Collapse Vol. IV: Concept Horror

COLLAPSE

Philosophical Research and Development
VOLUME IV

URB
ANO
MIC

COLLAPSE IV

Published in 2008 in an edition of 1000

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COLLAPSE

Philosophical Research and Development
VOLUME IV

Edited by
Robin Mackay

URBANOMIC
FALMOUTH

COLLAPSE IV

May 2008

Editor: Robin Mackay

Associate Editor: Damian Veal

Editorial Introduction 3

George Sieg

Infinite Regress into Self- Referential Horror:

The Gnosis of the Victim 29

Eugene Thacker

Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror 55

Rafani

Czech Forest 93

China Mieville

M. R.James and the Quantum Vampire:

Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?. ...105

Reza Negarestani

The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo 129

Jake and Dinos Chapman

I Can See 162

Michel Houellebecq,

Poems 173

James Trafford

The Shadow of a Puppet Dance:

Metzinger, Ligo tti and the Illusion of Selfhood 185

Thomas Ligotti / Oleg Kulik

ThinkingHorror / 'Memento Mori' -Dead Monkeys 208

QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX

Spectral Dilemma 261

Benjamin Noys

Horror Temporis 277

1

COLLAPSE III

Iain Hamilton Grant / Todosch

Being and Slime: The Mathematics of Protoplasm in Lorenz

Oken's 'Physio-Philosophy' / Drawings 286

Steven Shearer

Poems 323

Graham Harman / Keith Tilford

On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl /

Singular Agitations and a Common Vertigo 332

Kristen Alvanson

Arbor Deformia, 366

Notes on Contributors and Acknowledgements 391

COLLAPSE IV

Editorial Introduction

Robin Mackay

Surveying a century in which experience has taught us
that man is capable of inventing ever more atrocious forms
of violence and horror, is it necessary to remark that much
of modern thought offers little to soothe, and much to
exacerbate our disquiet? Nietzsche famously observed that
the psychic well-being of the human organism is predicated,
minimally, upon a drastically partial perspective, and
ultimately upon untruth. Human cognitive defaults continue
to cry out against the insights which modern physics,
cosmology, genetics, neuroscience, psychoanalysis and the
rest seem to require us to integrate into our worldview. As
for philosophy, it has largely replaced wonder, awe, and
the drive to certainty with dread, anxiety and finitude.
Moreover, despite the diverse technological wonders
they have made possible, the modern sciences offer little
existential respite: There is no consolation in the claim that
(for instance) I am the contingent product of evolution, or a
chance formation of elementary particles, or that my 'self is

COLLAPSE IV

nothing but the correlate of the activation of neurobiological
phase-spaces. Yet mundane thought, whether through
obstinacy or inertia, maintains its stubborn course
regardless, as if oblivious to their consequences, or at
most allowing them to subsist at a safely delimited, solely
theoretical level.

What if, prising the more disturbing elements of modern
thought loose from their comfortable framing as part of an
intellectual canon, we were to become fully attentive to
their most harrowing consequences? What if, impatient
with a consideration of their claims solely from the point
of view of their explanatory power and formal consistency,
we yielded to the (perhaps 'unphilosophical') temptation
to experiment with their potentially corrosive effects upon
lived experience? If the overriding affect connected with
what we 'know' - but still do not really know - about the
universe and our place in it, would be one of horror, then,
inversely, how might the existing literature of horror inform
a reading of these tendencies of contemporary thought?

These are some of the questions with which this
volume of Collapse sets out to grapple, imagining for a
moment a philosophy absolved of humanistic responsibili-
ties, devoting itself to the experimental marshalling of all
possible resources in the service of a transformation that
would no longer be circumscribed within the bounds of the
purely theoretical, and thus striking an alliance with those
affects which, for the most part elided, nonetheless haunt
philosophical thought like its very shadow. A philosophy,
then, bound to experiment with the employment of horror,
that its insights might begin slowly but effectively to erode
anthropic automatism.

Editorial Introduction

Such experiments are already being undertaken - not
for the most part by philosophers, but by those working in
literature and the arts who, drawing upon the resources of
modern thought, have devised means by which to produce
experiences of the conceptual upheavals characteristic of
the post-Enlightenment age. It is the scenarios of weird
and horror fiction, the excessive existential sufferings of
literature, the abstract emotional engineering of sound-art
and music, and the poetical extrapolations of artists, that
are apt to put us in the place of individuals set loose from
the protective envelope of consensual reality, forced to
integrate directly the lacerating force of thoughts usually
blunted (even - or, sad to say, especially - in philosophical
discourse) by the knowledge that they are, after all, ^only
thoughts'. It is through them that we identify ourselves
with tormented individuals compelled - even if only
momentarily - to live the problem of the rational corrosion
of our cherished self-image, to viscerally absorb thoughts
'whose merest mention is paralysing' (Lovecraft) .

In the twentieth century, sf, weird fiction, and horror in
particular have furnished a laboratory for shaping narratives
pointedly informed by the conceptual paradoxes produced
by modern science and philosophy. And increasingly,
philosophy itself, and the high arts which so long looked
with disdain upon such pulp fictions, are realising with what
anticipatory clarity these genres have formulated problem-
atics which are becoming ever more pressing, not only
conceptually and aesthetically, but even politically (given
what is at stake in our maintenance of a naive, comfortable
self-image even as the most speculative theoretical insights
are immediately and ruthlessly operationalised throughout
the sociopolitical and commercial spheres, from advertising
to healthcare, from warfare to banking) .

COLLAPSE IV

Given this discursive intersection between the attempt
to rethink reality through contemporary science and
philosophy and the tropes of the horror 'genre', then,
there is a certain logic in examining together conceptual
armature and artistic dramatisation. It was this double-
edged approach that we decided to take in the present
volume, by bringing together contributions from authors
of weird fiction, artists, and philosophers - only to discover
ourselves vindicated by the impossibility of determining
where the concept ends and the horror begins. The theme
thus presented an opportunity to bring more fully to fruition
Collapse's vision of an integration of elements originating
from very different spheres, mutually catalysing so as to
produce a series of conceptual 'interzones'.

George Sieg's contribution ably demonstrates how, in
examining the nature of horror as an affect, a rich inter-
section of cognitive, conceptual, existential and political
stakes comes into view. Firstly, unlike the essentially animal
responses of fear and terror, horror attaches especially to
the conceptual abstraction and reflexivity attendant upon
self-consciousness - which is as much as to say that homo
philosophicus is defined by a capacity for feeling horror. As
Sieg argues, horror is characterised more through its victims
than through its predators, and the victim's itinerary is
always that from innocence to knowledge. Corollary to this
is the impossibility of flight to a 'critical' position on horror,
since it is 'always already' (even such hoary philosophical
locutions reveal a menacing aspect here ...) the horror of
knowing horror - whence Sieg's characterisation of horror
as peculiarly 'gnostic' (thus introducing a recurrent theme
of this volume) .

Sieg locates the historical kernel of horror in
the endotropic amplification of an anthropological

6

Editorial Introduction

commonplace - the Zoroastrian concept of druj as
xenophobia turned inward. However, in order for horror
to flower, he emphasises, another element is necessary -
a thoroughgoing materialism, in which the knowledge
of non-apparent conceptual distinction - the sensitivity
towards hidden otherness - is prevented from diffusing into
mysticism: The very birth, one might say, of the distinction
between philosophy and religion, is also the birth of horror.
It is this compaction, suggests Sieg, which finally blocks all
exit from a self-referential universe pregnant with horror
and yet (or precisely because it is) entirely rational - a
universe in which the innocent victim is defenceless before
the monstrous knowledge which invades them.

In his contribution Eugene Thacker details how
theology has, nevertheless, maintained a consistent historical
relation to horror. His 'Nine Disputations on Theology and
Horror' examines the extent to which the concept of 'life'
owes its integrity to an immanent 'after-life' which is the
proper object of horror. If life is defined by a duplicity - the
distinction between the living being and life 'itself - then,
according to Thacker's historical survey of the 'teratological
noosphere', in the undertow of the questioning of life we
always find changing conceptualizations of afterlife, whose
horrific avatars are so many embodiments (or disembodi-
ments) of this problematic duplicity. They provide us with
a handle on a fundamental question of biopolitics in its
varying historical forms: The suppression of the after-life
immanent to life, whose horror reveals that which is already
there prior to individual lives, the anonymous Levinasian
'there is' which, Thacker argues, is 'a point of attraction
for ontology' - in Thacker's coinage, a 'nouminous' (both
noumenal and numinous) life. However as Thacker's
'disputations' deepen, the 'always-receding horizon' of the

COLLAPSE IV

concept of life leads him to a more radical consideration of
'life as non-being', or the horror of 'life-without-Being'.

In their 'Czech Forest' cycle, Prague artist collective
Rafani take an oblique approach to confronting a horrifying
episode in their national history. Although at their birth
Rafani announced themselves through overtly political
manifestos, by addressing this suppressed event through a
reappropriation of folk art, 'Czech Forest' displays a keen
ability to navigate the borders of the political, the mythical
and the aesthetic. In doing so, it adds a supplement to George
Sieg's argument that horror has its roots in xenophobia and
the fear of the 'enemy within'.

At the end of the Second World War, Czech inhabitants
of the now-liberated Sudetenland turned on neighbouring
Germans, whose families in some cases had inhabited the
forest region for over a centuiy, and drove them out with
vengeful ferocity. The slogans reproduced in Rafani's iconic
images (from the 'Unofficial Decalogue of Czech Soldiers
in the Borderland', a propaganda handbook published
at the time) demonstrate starkly enough how this trium-
phalist convulsion relayed the horrors suffered under
occupation, revisiting them once more upon the innocent.
But the 'Czech forest' of the title also conducts a deeper
current: the Forest, as fairy-tale locus of darkness, where
children get lost, monsters lurk, and, at dusk, branch and
leaf become menacingly animate. By subtly adapting the
folk-art-inspired woodcuts that often illustrate such tales,
Rafani's work connects the transmutation of the rage of the
oppressed into xenophobic hatred, with the mythopoetic
roots of fear, thus transforming the story from national
history into psychogeographical fable of horror: it becomes
a reminder of what lurks beneath the comfort of homeliness,
and of the horror of the internal other.

Editorial Introduction

Graham Harman's emblematic invocation of 'the
electrons that form the pulpy torso of Great Cthulhu'
reminds us that the hard-nosed materialism that is a
prerequisite for the emergence of horror finds its equally
necessary counterpart in the polysemic qualifier 'pulp'.
Historically describing the re-formed, low-grade paper used
to manufacture magazines carrying what was, and to some
extent still is, considered low-grade and derivative literature,
including fantastic fiction and comics, 'pulp' came to apply
also to the latter's supposedly 'generic' nature. More than
coincidentally it also sits well with what China Mieville
nominates, in his contribution, the 'new (Weird) haptic' -
a certain 'palpability' associated with horror and whose
avatar, Mieville proposes, is that exemplarily 'formless'
creature, the octopus - le poulpe. Himself a contemporary
giant of weird fiction, and an unashamed champion of
pulp, in his essay Mieville clearly demonstrates that an
attentive reading of the history of the fantastic underpins
his fiction. He undertakes to extract from their various
historical combinations and scissions the two currents of
the weird and the 'hauntological'. Taking the 'skulltopus'
and its 'extreme rarity [...] in culture' as an indicator that
the coexistence of the two genres makes them no less
inviolably distinct, Mieville argues that, if the rise of the
weird belongs to 'crisis-blasted modernity' - the enlighten-
ment become dark - and if in contemporary capitalism we
live the weird, we are also haunted by ghosts of futures that
never happened: the superposed temporalities of the genres
expressing the tensions of post-modernity

Disabusing us of any suspicion that the link between
horror and philosophical thought is a purely modern
invention, Reza Negarestani's contribution recounts

COLLAPSE IV

how a certain hideously ingenious torture was no sooner
historically recorded than its most gruesome details were
employed as a conceptual resource for philosophical
meditation. Building on a fragment from a lost work by
Aristotle, 'The Corpse Bride' launches a necrophilic inves-
tigation into the idea of ontology as a system of metaphys-
ical cruelty which reveals vitalism to be a 'farce' played out
among the remains of the already-dead.

In imbuing a famous Etruscan torture with universal
pertinence, Negarestani's Aristotle becomes a prophet
of terror, insistent that any intelligible ontology as such
mobilises non-belonging (or nothing) through the agency
of a chain of putrefactory ratios or problematic intimacies
with the dead. Aristotle assimilates the bond between soul
and body with the bond between corpse and living victim,
wherein only the differential layer of blackening or nigredo
can properly be called 'life'. Yet in Negarestani's argument,
even this chemistry of horror is only a preface to a deeper
bond with the void which Aristotle seeks to dissimulate.
The final twist in Negarestani's investigation, in which the
glorification of negativity or the subtractive mobilization of
non-belonging (Badiou, Zizek, etal) is revealed as an implicit
and unconditional affirmation of the radically exterior,
adds new and macabre detail to his previous Collapse
essays on absolute exteriority and 'affordance': survival
becomes an art of living with the dead, of maintaining a
ratio of intensive decay to extensive putrefaction, of abiding
in nigredo.

What follows from Negarestani's probing of the
problematic conjunction of nekrous and philia, the dead and
the essence of affirmation, reads like a thoroughly perverse
twisting of Deleuze's dialectic of problem and solution, and

10

Editorial Introduction

a retrospective 'blackening' of the history of differential
calculus he associates with it: for 'what could be worse for
vitalism than at once being animated through a necrophilic
alliance, and simultaneously, protected under the aegis of
the void'?

The work of Jake and Dinos Chapman has continually
toyed with the cohabitation of horror and laughter,
employing the debasement of form and image as a weapon
against moral self-certainty Proof of concept in this respect
was achieved in their (2004) 'improvement' of Goya's
famous Disasters of War through 'rectifications' that yanked
the atrocity-victims into a cruelly absurd cartoon universe
that addressed the viewer far more intensely and disqui-
etingly than the 'originals' with their patina of historical
didacticism and art-historical legitimation.

In the drawings they contribute to our volume, the
Chapman brothers continue a preoccupation with the
uncannily vacant images of the children's colouring book
(see e.g. Gigantic Fun [2000], My Giant Colouring Book [2004]).
In / Can See, vulgarised Bataillean themes vie with the
vacant potency of stereotyped simulacra reproduced for
juvenile consumption; the comically brutal irruption into
these adumbrated banalities of fragments of body-horror,
and an insidious cross-breeding with the Chapmans' own
stock of cartoon atrocities, engenders a menacing air of
inanity that resists easy decipherment. The artists' program-
matic impoverishments, testing the limit at which the image
will cease to conduct the craving for improvement, might
be read in the light of Negarestani's Aristotelian arithmetic
as a willed acceleration of the putrefaction of the form of
art, an iterative process of decay which, however, only ever
momentarily disturbs the veneration of 'what remains'.

11

COLLAPSE IV

The Chapmans' extended practical joke on the art-world
continually subverts any anticipation that a work should
supply abreactive or cathartic moral reinforcement through
didactically-framed images ('eye-care'?). Instead it invites a
jarring and problematic convulsion, an irresolvable horror
vacui.

If Lovecraft's name resounds throughout this volume,
making several of his tales 'required reading' for the
collected articles, it often does so through the filter of
another work. Hardly a work of 'secondary literature'

- despite its biographical form, it is more of a passionate
affirmation and exacerbation of Lovecraft's great themes

- Michel Houellebecq^s H.PLovecrajt: Against the World,
Against Life 1 is one of the few studies to successfully explore
the singular qualities of Lovecraft's work. And, as little as
it may seem evident at first, reading Houellebecq's own
work through his appreciation for Lovecraft reveals a
profound influence. Houellebecq's characters too live out
the 'unlivable', encountering in heightened form the cosmic
horrors which modern society simultaneously unleashes
and suppresses; they are individuals who have taken into
their very soul the full weight of what we know about our
universe and our place within it. Yet unlike Lovecraft's
doomed heroes, for the most part Houellebecq's remain
trapped within the banal everyday: with no respite even
through the negative transcendence of madness, the
world becomes a relentless trial, its everyday rituals and
objects beacons of desolate horror. Houellebecq's poems

- a selection of which we are delighted to include in this
volume translated into English for the first time - distil his
powerful vision into translucid moments of dread certainty.

1. Trans. D. Khazeni. San Francisco: Belie

■Books, 2005.

12

Editorial Introduction

The poems record moments when the obtuse momentum
of life draws it momentarily into proximity with the indif-
ference of the universe; they offer no affirmation, no
redemption, but only an icy clarity, a kind of conciliation
with this indifference. The most innocuous spaces of the
everyday ('the insides of cupboards') become abysmal
revelations, whilst the empty repetitions of life reveal time
as an implacable horror of merciless recurrence 'every day,
until the end of the world'.

In his reading of the work of Thomas Ligotti - one of
the foremost contemporary exponents of weird fiction - in
tandem with the neurophilosophy of Thomas Metzinger,
James Trafford argues that the horrifying travails of
Ligotti's protagonists give phenomenological expression to
insights anticipating those presented in Metzinger's extraor-
dinary treatise Being No-One. The latter includes explicitly
as one of its goals the achievement of a theory that can be
'culturally integrated'; 2 Trafford's suggestion is that such
an integration may imply a passage through horrors similar
to those described - and generated - by Ligotti's singularly
suffocating tales.

Metzinger's central contention is that the apparent
immediacy or transparency of phenomenological
appearances owes itself to an instrumental miscogni-
tion: transparency is in fact a 'special form of darkness'.
Ligotti's fiction, premissed upon the catastrophic undoing
of this miscognition, this protective opacity, documents the
experience of the unravelling of selfhood.

Sieg argues that the monster is a less indispensable
element of the horror genre than the victim, and it is the
victims in Ligotti's fictions, in their plumbing of the depths

2. T Metzinger, Being No One: Tlw Self-Model Tlwory of Subjectivity (London: MIT Press,
2004).

13

COLLAPSE IV

of a 'spinning abyss' (recalling the 'layers within layers
of horrific depravity' revealed to Sieg's gnostics) that
Trafford sees as revealing the dark truth of Metzinger's
'nemocentrism'.

In his own contribution, Thomas Ligotti demon-
strates that not only is self-consciousness a precondition
for horror, the two are inextricable. 'Thinking Horror' is
thus a pleonasm: the new epoch heralded by the dawn of
self-consciousness is characterized by the production of
'horrors [and] flagrantly joyless possibilities' and - swiftly
ensuing - the erection of psychic defences against truth,
either explicit, socialised, or in the form of commonplace
ironies and homely platitudes ('being alive is okay').

If Ligotti's fictions represent so many twisted descents
into the void, here it is offered to us neat, in the manner of
a classic, if unhinged, essayist, and with a certain humour
indissociable from such dismal truths. Eschewing any
orientation of his position according to the standard co-or-
dinates of a philosophical orthodoxy, Ligotti introduces
us to the obscure figures who form his secret lineage of
pessimism, and invents a pulp philosophy at once bracing
for its brutal honesty and perversely enjoyable for its
mordant wit.

Whilst much contemporary thought remains doggedly
committed to continuing the perennial philosophical battle
against mechanism and determinism, focusing increasingly
sophisticated conceptual resources on the characterisation of
'singularities' or 'events', Ligotti aligns himself, against 'the
crushing majority of philosophers', with a pessimistic creed
which, refusing to imprudently postulate such exceptions,
instead assigns itself the sole task of outlining the futility of
man's lot and the comical details of his desperate attempts

14

Editorial Introduction

to think without thinking horror. Ligotti rightly locates the
interest of this programme less in its conceptual innovation
than in its audacious defiance of the snares of rhetoric and
the delights of intellectual sophistication. For, rather than
reason, is it not these latter passions which govern more
'sophisticated' philosophical architectonics, and in doing so
obscure the conceptual vistas that might open up to those
brave or foolhardy enough to interrogate philosophically the
'taboo commonplaces' which they superciliously outlaw? 3
For Ligotti, though, perhaps even such interrogations risk
tainting the crystalline clarity of thinkers such as Zapffe and
Mainlander, for whom the real question swiftly becomes
a practical one - in a reprise of the Gnostic abhorrence of
nature and will-to-extinction.

One might of course argue that, even in writing, such
thinkers, and Ligotti himself, yield to the tide of life. Even
the will to know, to think, and to write, may itself be a
sublimated form of the not knowing that is crucial to survival.
But if thinking and writing can themselves be sources of
distraction, a thinking and writing of 'concept horror'
attempts to force the reader to secrete something of the
poison that is buried within them; it is a kind of demonic
invocation. No less than his fictions, Ligotti's straightfor-
ward account of our 'malignant uselessness' succeeds in so
far as its language - like that of Lovecraft's eldritch incanta-
tions - ceases to be representational and begins to summon
the very desolate reality it describes, doing away with all
cultivated distance and calm objectivity. Ligotti counsels
precisely this surreptitious promotion of disillusionment, to
be carried out patiently by those in every age to whom it

3. A rare and fine example of such a dispassionate experiment in nihilism is Ray
Brassier 's recently published Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). (See also 'The Enigma of Realism' in Collapse II,

15-54.)

15

COLLAPSE IV

falls to carry on the bad work, hastening the dissolution of
the horrors of consciousness and life, and returning us to
the void.

Ligotti's text appears in our volume alongside a series
of photographs by Oleg Kulik, a Russian artist whose
work includes photography and photoassemblage but
which culminates in his extraordinary live actions. 4 One
of the first artists from post-Soviet Russia to have garnered
international attention, Kulik's work thematises the porous
boundary between animal and human (a tendency which
reached its infamous apex in 'Dog House' [1996] when,
exhibiting himself as a chained canine, Kulik was arrested
for physically harming and mentally traumatising members
of the public who flouted the warning to 'beware of the
dog'). As well as extending Kulik's researches into what
Mila Bredikhina has called 'zoophrenia', s Kulik's 'Memento
Mori' complexifies the dialectic of life and death, presenting
us with images of creatures who are doubly dead -
already corpses, their deaths have been preserved through
interment in a museum. Of course, we still cannot help
reading their visages as anthropomorphic signifiers, now
all the more macabre. Evincing all the stuffed-shirt dignity
of victorian portraiture, the photographs could also be
read as an extended 'family tree' - an ancestral archive we
might prefer to keep in the closet. Not only do they act as
'memento mori', reminding us of the horror of personal
death; they also remind us, as does Ligotti, of the senseless
and indifferent continuum of life of which we are an insig-
nificant part, and of the absurd folly of our enshrining
any part of it, stuffed and preserved, for posterity.
Perhaps Kulik thus identifies in advance the museums and

4. See the essential Oleg Kulik: Art Animal (Binning
documentation of Kulik's work from 1993-2000.

tarn: Ikon Gallery, 2001) for

5. Ibid., passim.

16

Editorial Introduction

commemorative discourses in which his own work is
destined to be preserved as cultural mausolea, even as he
promotes the simultaneous fascination and horror that the
mummified object, in its living death, evokes.

The alternately accusing and mutely questioning faces
of the dead monkeys describe a strange twisting associative
dance with Ligotti's text, the nuances of dumb bewilder-
ment and silent petition inviting us to identify ourselves
simultaneously with Kulik's photographic subjects and the
hapless, self-deluding targets of Ligotti's rant. A deeply felt
unease, and the troubled laughter that accompanies it, is the
inevitable initial response to this marriage of text and image.
But ironically, read within the context of Kulik's work,
'Memento Mori' obliquely hints at an egress from Ligotti's
dead end. For Kulik's performances seek a zoophrenic
overcoming of the limitations of the anthropic through a
plunging into the animal. The involvement of 'the point of
view of different biological species in aesthetic practice,' the
artist proposes, 'will produce a new renaissance' 6 - Since
the anthropomorphisation of the animal can only subject
it to a further death, we should rather zoonwrphise the human.
This strategy of a 'forward-to-nature' 7 zoofuturism implies
that escape from 'the crisis of human schizophrenic culture' 8
might involve intimacy with a horror that walks on four
legs - a horror that has left its teeth-marks on witnesses
to Kulik's uncompromising and profoundly disturbing
animal-becomings.

In this volume we present the final part of a 'trilogy'
of essays by Quentin Meillassoux, which proposes a

6. Ibid., 1.

7. Ibid, 51.

8. Ibid.

17

COLLAPSE IV

wholly different, rationalist, antidote to despair. In previous
contributions, Meillassoux presented his thesis of 'absolute
time' or 'the necessity of contingency', founded upon a
re-examination of Hume's problem. 9 In 'Spectral Dilemma',
he unveils the ethical consequences of the position,
introducing the conception of the 'virtual god' that lies at
the heart of the philosophical system to which the acclaimed
After Finitude 10 - although a significant intervention in its
own right - is a prolegomena. In his meditation on irre-
mediable bereavement, Meillassoux asks, with regard both
to the spectres of those whose loss is personal to us, and
to those belonging to the atrocities of the last century and
which seemingly cannot be dispelled, how it is possible to
escape the shadow of such deaths, thus to hope once more.
Meillassoux's answer to this question will surprise many,
but undoubtedly constitutes a consistent development
from his central philosophical contentions. Identifying the
dilemma presented by the theist and atheist responses to
the demands of 'essential mourning' - namely, that one
must hope something for the dead, but that any existing
god, having to be held responsible for their sufferings, can
only be the object of horror and repugnance rather than
veneration - Meillassoux shows that the 'impossible' concil-
iation of the parties must be sought through a thinking of
the divine character of inexistence, which is further expanded
into a very particular modal thesis, revealing the solution
to the 'spectral dilemma' to be a formal counterpart to the
speculative-rational solution of Hume's problem.

9. Q. Meillassoux, 'Potentiality and Virtuality', Collapse Vol. II (2007), 55-82 and
R. Brassier 'The Enigma of Realism', 207-34, in the same volume; 'Subtraction and
Contraction', Collapse Vol. Ill (2007), 63-107.

10. Trans. R. Brassier (London/NY: Continuum, 2008)

18

Editorial Introduction

Meillassoux presents us here with a foretaste of what
he will develop of a divinology, in rupture with the very
couplet a/theism. But if the question for the bereaved is
then no longer that of having enough time to mourn, but
of what type of time, then, glancing forward to Benjamin
Noys' reading of Lovecraft's conception of time, we might
wonder whether the god who is to come, but whose arrival
depends upon a lawless 'hyperchaos', is not destined to visit
upon its devotees a l Horror lemporis' more terrible still than
the dilemma from which it frees them. Inspired by Meillas-
soux's conception of 'absolute time', Noys suggests that, if
(as Harman argues) the comparison between Lovecraft and
Kant does not hold good, at least one affinity between them
may yet be attested: in the introduction into weird fiction
of the affect corresponding to the 'empty form of time'.
Time, released from its anthropocentric cycles, becomes
unhinged and threatening in its indifference to humanity;
fully purified, as in Meillassoux, of sufficient reason, it
implies a 'suspension of natural laws'. Invoking the 'arche-
fossil' as emblem of cosmic temporal disquiet, Noys notes
that the Meillassouxian universe, freed from the yoke of the
Principle of Sufficient Reason by a time whose vicissitudes
are not even ameliorated by lawfulness, carries the Love-
craftian implication of a 'material "outside" responding to
no law', a truly 'unmasterable' god - it is the universe of
Azathothic materialism, releasing us 'into the experience of the
horror of [. . .] the seething vortex of time'. And, as we know,
those of Lovecraft's protagonists who fall under the eldritch
shadow of beings hailing from this 'outside', far from finding
their hope replenished, finish traumatised and deranged.
Given the trajectory of 'irrealism' which accompanies the
discovery of horror temporis, Noys concludes fittingly by
showing how Peaslee's 'researches', unsatisfactorily abridged

19

COLLAPSE IV

in the ending of Lovecraft's tale, might be completed from
the perspective of a contemporary philosophy of the real
which reveals time itself as the 'shadow'.

German artist Todosch 11 (whose work, like that of
Oleg Kulik, has involved an uncanny intimacy with the
animal: one of his live actions, connected with the infamous
'Hundetunnel' project in Chicago, 12 involved implanting
dog fangs into his mouth for a year) produces work which
seems to invite myths and/or rationalisations whilst simulta-
neously repelling them: How to 'explain' live actions causing
great public inconvenience and stress-testing public reaction
(various Sisyphean labours including dragging six carriages
of scrap through the streets from Berlin to the Hanover
Expo) ; fictional institutions (Das Fatten von Bohmen, Conscious
Force) which realise themselves through an exhaustive
documentary archive; or the painstaking production of
strange objects (cute pokemon-like critters that turn out to
have been carved from Carrera marble) like fetishes of a
classical alien culture? A part of their disarraying force, and
the irresistible desire to quell it with some narrative, results
from a forced confrontation with the brute materiality of the
heterogeneous matter that surrounds us but whose opacity
and intractability are systematically suppressed through
commodification and habituation. Refusing to make it serve
him, as an artist Todosch repeatedly takes the burden of
(physical, informational, cultural) 'stuff upon himself. The
drawings which he contributes to this volume of Collapse
might be understood both as a depiction and a channeling
of this heterogeneous, cloacal, sinewy, abstract matter.
The 'stuff is never quite recognisable, but is recognisably

ll.A.K.A Thorsten Schlopsmes. See http://todosch.felix-werner.net/
12. See "Thorsten Schlopsmes -Todosch', in Umelec 2, 2005, 51-4.

20

Editorial Introduction

impure, and evidently in the process either of coagulation or
of decomposition - a research study from one of Todosch' s
fictitious institutions, The Institute for Recycling Reality?

Quite apart from the general ineptitude attacked by
Graham Harman, there is a particular want of critical
finesse in denouncing as 'continental science fiction' the
work of Iain Hamilton Grant, who his readers will
know as the foremost exponent of steampunk materialism, 13
but who has latterly become - judging by his more recent
works' protracted descent into what he has described as
'the nuclear night of the unthinged' 14 - chief scribe of idealist
horror. In his essay on Lorenz Oken, which accompanies
Todosch's drawings, Grant adds an extraordinary coda to
the powerful case put in his recent book 15 for the contem-
porary importance of a philosophy of nature.

As anticipated in Grant's earlier account in Collapse 16
of the necessarily speculative form of its central problem
- that of accounting for its own possibility qua natural
production - the chief horror of naturephilosophy is that
of an evacuation of the 'comfort zone of interiority'. 17 If
'the Idea is exterior to the thinking, the thinking is exterior
to the thinker, and the thinker is exterior to the nature that
produced it', then naturephilosophy's vocation, in the shape
of thinking the production of thought, is to turn 'us' inside

13. See, e.g. 'At the Mountains of Madness: The Demonology of the New Earth and
the Politics of Becoming', in Delenze and Philosophy, ed. K. A. Pearson (London
Routledge, 1997); and 'Burning AutoPoiOedipus', in Abstract Culture 2:5 (At http://
www.ccru net/swarm2/2_auto htm).

14. 'The Chemistry of Darkness', inPLI: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 9 (2000),
36-52: 36.

15. Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (NY/London: Continuum, 2006).

16. See 'Speculative Realism', in Collapse III, 307-449.

17. Ibid , 334, 343

21

COLLAPSE IV

out, in the process making it impossible 'for anyone to
recognise themselves in the production of their thoughts'. 18
This is accompanied, too, by an unpleasant community with
the lower orders, far beyond zoophrenia (and even within
the individual - in Oken's theory of recapitulation the body
becomes an infolded horror in which the head is a spine,
the jaws and teeth deterritorialized limbs and nails ...).

Since a universe where even thought is a natural
production, its 'content' thus having no necessary purchase
on that production, is indeed something Very difficult to
imagine', 19 we might say that a successful naturephilosophy
would be akind of forcible manipulation of the imagination;
that it must appear in the form of a literally mind-bending
speculative science/fiction and a brutal dismemberment
of the body of representational thinking, relegating the
Kantian a priori to a mere natural-historical prius, thought
being separated from its conditions not by some absolutised
transcendental membrane but by an asymmetry in the
time of production. 20 Naturephilosophy thus provides the
formal schema for precisely that negation of the 'insularity
of transcendental subjectivity' which (as Trafford argues)
is harboured by the neuroscientific viewpoint and which
afflicts Ligotti's tormented protagonists.

If this gives us permission to speak of naturephilosophy
as a kind of intellectual self-harm, an auto-horrification,
Grant insists that against its 'better judgement', contem-
porary philosophy must indeed inflict this harm upon
itself once again. Does post-Kantian philosophy, he asks,
bowed by the blows of naturalism, dare escape the 'trap' of

18. Ibid., 343.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., 343.

22

Editorial Introduction

reasserting its 'comfort zone' through some neo-Fichtean
subordination of the natural conditions of thought (irrecov-
erably - indeed horrifically - excessive for thought itself)
to a pacificatory illusion of self-knowledge, and a resub-
ordination of physics to ethics? In reasserting the need
for a (necessarily speculative) account of nature to revoke
Kant's 'daring act of reason' which ineluctably peters out
into the 'ethical process', Grant selects the model in which
naturephilosophy's science-fictional credentials are most
ostentatiously paraded - Lorenz Oken's monstrous (in
size as in content) account of the natural generation of the
universe.

In pursuing the ultimate ground of nature on the basis
that the whole of nature is involved in each part, Oken
characterises what Thacker described as the immanent
'after-life' of life as a universal Ur-slime [Urschliem]. But since
each successive sphere of nature constitutes an appearance
of 'something from nothing', then that 'nothing' appears
as another element in the naturephilosophical system:
Ur-slime and Zero, mucus and matheme, are thus pitted
against each other as true genetic elements of nature. Grant's
negotiation of Oken's twisted dialectic of Zero, the 'sink'
at the 'core' of existence, and Slime as its 'oozing ground',
ends in the affirmation of an 'ontological queasiness' that
cannot be ceded to the hygienic instinct. In a conclusion
which demonstrates the capacity of naturephilosophy to
offer new and profound readings of contemporary philo-
sophical problems - in this case that of Badiou's mobilisa-
tion of a dialectic of 'animal' and 'number' against Deleuze
- Grant argues that the impossibility of abstracting away
'the shock of the objective world' means that there can be
no 'slime-free matheme' unless via a unilateral assertion of

23

COLLAPSE IV

the impossibility of a philosophy of nature - which would
be simply to blanch squeamishly at that twisting, oozing
process which is thinking (or being thought by) nature.

Using the search-engine as a stratigraphical probe to
sample the online collective unconscious, artist Steven
Shearer assembles vast archives (sometimes partially
exhibited as works in their own right) recording otherwise
uncelebrated cultural and social formations, including in
particular the young fans who draw sustenance from the
hyperenergetic musical genre of death metal. The Poems
series (2001-present) draws upon an extensive archive of
death metal band and song names, evidence of the genre's
unremitting quest to make the cutting edges of language
coincide with the violence of its sonic bombardment.
Resynthesising the archive material to create a hysterical
cycle of disturbing, fantastical, and absurd narratives and
imageiy, Shearer's well-honed method of selection yields
a striking and consistent objective cross-section of this
cultural matter.

Although the relentless, hysterical fervour of the Poems
is certainly amusing at times, Shearer's work never stoops
to ironic condescension. Like the lambent depictions of
longhaired fans in his glowering Munch-like paintings, or
in portraits which make of the humble biro an old-mas-
terly instrument, the Poems are imbued with a sensitivity
to a collective existential quandary whose inhabitants
seek to anchor themselves to the most extreme point of
reference in a world of demonstrable mediocrity. And as
Shearer's Poems forcibly and prolongedly hold the viewer's
gaze captive at the point where language is flattened out
into a continuous and impassive appeal to what it can't say,
his work rediscovers this extreme point. Beyond the lyrics'

24

Editorial Introduction

superficial preoccupations with death and violence lie more
real and more profound depths of horror, distributed social-
existential complexes rather than personal pathologies.
Seen in the light of Shearer's other work - for instance,
his archive of thousands of eBay photographs that uninten-
tionally afford glimpses into metalheads' home lives - the
evident absurdity of the Poemi unremitting nihilism, the
distance between such extremity and 'real life', becomes
an index of isolation and of the psychic torment of sociali-
sation, showing how the metalhead's absolute 'no' to life
anchors them against their inevitable concession to the
tepid homeliness of 'reality'.

In their painstakingly hand-drawn form, the Poems
have been exhibited both in galleries and in public spaces
- Notably, during the 2006 Berlin Biennial, on the flank
of an eight-storey building (see p. 322). Thus transformed,
they invite a little of the negative sublime unapologetically
celebrated by this subculture into the overlit, overfinanced
spaces of the contemporary arts whose executives once
told Shearer (as documented in Sorry Steve [1999]): 'when
we talk about celebrating cultural diversity, we don't mean
yours'. 21 It is through a sort of sociological alchemy that
Shearer distils and recombines - so they can no longer be
overlooked - the potent elements of what Lovecraft might
have called a shoggoth-cuhure, with all the class associations
implied in this (one of Shearer's favourite epithets for his
works is 'lumpen'). Shearer's poetic invocations also echo
those of Lovecraft, who considered his task to be to excite
a physiological response in his readers. Again, like the
famously overdone Lovecraftian prose - itself frequently

21. See the beautiful recently published monograph accompanying Shearer's 2007-8
shows in Birmingham and Toronto: Steven Shearer (Birmingham/Toronto: Ikon
Gallery/Powerplant, 2007).

25

COLLAPSE IV

verging on the comical or hysterical - the Poems obsessively
invoke or engender, rather than merely describing, the
objectless cosmic horror that inhabits every thinking being
- the non-sense that ungrounds sense -but which some, by
force of circumstance, are closer to than others, so that they
may even cherish the secret of its constant closeness as a
source of psychic sustenance.

'On the Horror of Phenomenology' finds Graham
Harman arguing, against a certain normative notion of
philosophical 'maturity', in favour of the demonstrable and
necessary weirdness of philosophy. Turning to Husserl's
phenomenology as a test case, Harman suggests that
reading its insistence on the excessiveness of intentional
objects against Lovecraft's descriptive delirium might
provide some pointers towards the type of 'weird realism'
he advocates.

Problematising a Kantian reading of Lovecraft, Harman
concurs with Mieville that a hallmark of weird writing is that
it takes on the 'unspeakable' with an 'excess of specificity' in
description; adding that, rather than suggesting a noumenal
'backworld', this is the excess of a phenomenal realm
pregnant with the menace of 'malignant beings' which are
threatening precisely in so far as they stalk the very same
web of experience whose threads we too clamber along,
attempting to ignore their more ominous vibrations.

Using literature's manufacture of unassimilable and
inexhaustible objects as a model for the production of phil-
osophical concepts, Harman insists that the latter's excess
over any definition makes them, too, excessive phenomena,
intentional objects whose properties can never be exhaus-
tively enumerated - precisely the model proposed by
Husserl's sensitive and meticulous phenomenology.

26

Editorial Introduction

Reading the persistent poring of phenomenological
description over its object against Lovecraft's circumlocu-
tory evocations of the unspeakable, Harman discovers -
like Negarestani - that 'real objects taunt us with endless
withdrawal'. The probing of a disconnection between
the 'excessive presence' of intentional objects and the
withdrawing correlate that binds their qualities is the motor
of both phenomenology and horror - As Mieville argues,
the weird and the horrific are always palpable, but their
pulpy flesh ultimately always escapes our grasp. What
appears at first to be a mere similarity between literary
style and philosophical programme reveals, according to
Harman, a common strategy for intuiting this faultline in
the object, this 'weird tension in [...] phenomena'.

Kristen Alvanson's contribution presents us with a
deformation produced in thought in its ongoing struggle
to encompass the horror of nature's indifference to its clas-
sificatory desires. Her Arbor Deformia is a cross-section of a
discursive phylum, the product of the baffled internal forces
and tendencies of reason.

Images such as those in Alvanson's contribution (not
least the fearsome 'spider-goat' [p. 366], whose branch in
the Arbor surely neighbours that of Mieville's 'skulltopus')
have always been the object of simultaneous fascination
and repulsion. Her photographs capture unfortunate
creatures in already preserved form, as 'doubly-dead' as
Kulik's monkeys; ail-too familiar, but so repugnant as to
oblige us to a discursive dissociation. As she notes, they
therefore seem to breed conceptual monstrosities, out-of-
control taxonomical systems as deranged as the beings they
are designed to corral into rational discourse. The Arbor
Deformia, integrating the biological and taxonomical levels

27

COLLAPSE IV

of this twofold teratologism, gives an inventive graphical
solution to the twisted logics of Pare's sixteenth-century
classifications.

It is not only Mieville's essay whose very title exhibits
the combinatorial dis-ease it discusses, that vindicates this
thesis according to which, when reason turns its classifica-
tory attentions toward monsters, taxonomy itself tends to
become diseased and monstrous; in fact, Alvanson's work
seems a fitting coda to the entire volume in its affirmation
that one does not bring the concept to bear on horror
without horror simultaneously investing the conceptual.

We would like to offer our sincere thanks to all of
our contributors for their work and commitment, and
for having collaborated so willingly in our experiment in
concept-horror. Their enthusiasm and generosity has made
possible a volume whose diversity and wealth of conceptual
interconnections this brief overview has only been able to
hint at. We hope that the work collected here will - in line
with our subtitle - provide inspiration both for further
philosophical research, and for further development in
the shape of literary and artistic creations fit to assemble
philosophical ideas into machines for effective deterritori-
alization, whether it be through the 'experiential gnosis of
horror', 'multiple fraud', 'zoophrenia', 'mental experiment',
'neurotechnology', the 'shock of the objective', 'molecular
disembowelment', 'necrophilic reason', the 'furtive broad-
casting of disillusionment' or even, in the last resort, through
'purely medical means' ... Let the horrors commence.

Robin Mackay,
Falmouth, April 2008.

28

COLLAPSE IV

Infinite Regress into
Self- Referential Horror:
The Gnosis of the Victim

George J. Sieg

0. Dwelling on the Threshold

Aversion to stimuli of fear or terror, whether personal or
cultural, offers no great mystery beyond the psychological.
Neither does the pattern of habituation and desensitiza-
tion resulting from levels of fear and terror sufficient only
to gradually bore the mind and senses. Similarly straight-
forward is the pattern of trauma, burnout, and malady
proceeding from constant and unremitting over-exposure
to stimuli producing anxiety and stress. These phenomena,
while intriguing to the scholar of behaviour and cognition,
offer nothing to compete with the philosophical fascination
engendered by contemplation of their weirder sister,
Horror. She presides over a genre of art which violates
boundaries of medium as surely as she violates the precon-
ceptions of those who apprehend her; yet she shares her
imageries, even her key signs and signifiers, with genres
which would seem at first examination to be quite distinct.

29

COLLAPSE IV

(How often do the monsters typical of horror find their
way into fantasies and 'science' fictions? The masters and
progenitors of modern horror, Poe and Lovecraft, wrote
tales of mystery and wonder along with their more horrific
works. In the latter case, the same Mythos appeared in all
of his chosen genres). 1

Whether expressed in the cinema or in the word, or
experienced viscerally in the routines or tragedies of life,
Horror remains distinctly consistent, arising from an
experience of cognitive dread which cannot be escaped
or evaded. Indeed, this very conceptual consistency is
one of its traits: Horror is the most easily self-referential
of all genres. 2 Alone among concepts, Horror depends on
the concept of the 'concept' for its own conceptual power
- since dread beyond what can already be known to have been
conceived is an indispensable characteristic of horror; alone
among concepts, a full conception and understanding of
it, implies the experience of it. Horror is not alone among
those responses which require self-consciousness; animals
lacking individual self-consciousness provide no evidence
of experiencing horror despite their extensive capacity for
fear. Of course, animals also do not seem to experience
any other emotions typical of self-consciousness such as
wonder, awe, or creative amusement either. Yet horror
remains distinct from these others in its dependence on the

1. See S.TJoshi, HP. Lovecraft: TheDedbte of the West (Berkeley: Wildside Press, 1990)
for an extensive analysis of Lovecraft's work and philosophy.

2. Noel Carroll, Hie Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of t/ie Heart {New \brk: Routledge,
1990), 17-42. Carroll's work presents a theory of 'art-horror' elaborated in exacting
detail; the important aspect of it referenced here is that the horror genre depends, in
his view, on its establishment of direct correlation between the emotional state of the
monster's victim and the emotional state of the audience or reader. The rest of his
theory is not necessarily endorsed by the rest of this article.

30

Sieg-

Infinite Regress

capacity for conceptual abstraction. This capacity does not
seem to be necessitated in the case of awe, which is known
to be correlated with various 'numinous' states typical
of religious and mystical experiences notably lacking in
self-referential, conceptual abstraction; nor in the case of
wonder, a response which may arise as a meta-response to a
mysterious or apparently unfathomable event without any
corresponding attempt to 'conceive' of or 'conceptualize' it
any further. Thus it is that while children seem to display
an extensive capacity for awe and wonder along with their
similarly vast predilection for states of fear and terror (often
to the dismay of more 'rational' adults), the capability to
experience, appreciate, and even cultivate horror only
increases with the skill of rational, conceptual, critical thought.
Likewise, one may intellectually understand what numinous
awe or wonder may entail, without experiencing them in
the same context in which one understands them intellectu-
ally. Awe is not, in and of itself, awesome, nor is wonder in
and of itself necessarily wonderful, but horror, self-referen-
tially is, of and for itself, horrible and horrifying. That this is
so makes horror the most Gnostic of emotional extremes
and excesses, in the sense of being a knowledge character-
ized by directness of empirical experience (self-referential)
rather than based on some correspondent premise (other-
referential) . In keeping with this, it is no coincidence that
those mystics and esoteric philosophers deemed 'Gnostics'
in the increasingly decadent Imperial Roman cosmopolis
elaborated mythic reflections of the world which detailed
all manifest reality as nested layers within layers of horrific
depravity, their 'gnosis' (direct, experiential knowledge) of
salvation and escape implicitly depending on a nightmare
network of interwoven matrix-horrors to escape from.
The archaic roots of Gnostic horror can be followed

31

COLLAPSE IV

through the labyrinthine tunnels of historic and prehistoric
dualist myths, yet the experiential gnosis of horror is
certainly anterior to the dualistic coping mechanisms it
inspires in some persons and groups. Independently of, yet
inclusive of, both self and other, Horror pervades conscious-
ness which is conscious of itself: to observe someone suffi-
ciently horrified is horrific. To observe a horrific other - a
'monster' - is horrific. Yet to observe oneself horrified is
just as horrific, if not more so. Thus, Horror also maintains
the fascinating quality of being self-renewing, for while awe
and wonder may both collapse under sufficiently detached
rational observation, Horror only seems to increase the
more it is contemplated.

Yet the perpetrators and effectuators of Horror -
'monsters' in whatever form - do not seem to be guarantors
of Horror even if they are its prerequisites. (And 'monsters'
here means anything horrifying, not necessarily only
the tentacle-beasts reviled by Lovecraft or the cinematic
creations which prey on the sentiments of moviegoers.)
That this is so can easily be discerned by noticing that the
various beings of Lovecraft's Mythos appear throughout
his own tales of wonder (such as Randolph Carter's dream
quests) with the same frequency that they manifest in
overtly horrific contexts in the rest of his work. They spill
across the threshold not only of genre, but of authorship,
to populate the worlds of Robert Howard and ultimately
the annals of contemporary science-fiction in a variety of
media. Lest this phenomenon be thought limited to the
bizarre Old Ones of Lovecraftian provenance, the example
of the vampire should be sufficient contradiction. Perhaps
the most classic staple of 'gothic horror', whether cinematic
or literary, vampires nevertheless also find themselves in

32

Sieg - Infinite Regress

fantasy, science-fiction, and even works classifiable only
as mythic dramas (Anne Rice), not to mention their total
escapist attraction in the form of gothic role-playing and
subculture, neither of which exactly stimulate anything
like the emotion of horror in their participants. The only
consistent signifier of Horror is not the monster, but rather
its victim.

What might this tell us about the nature of self-con-
sciousness and its expression through the aesthetic? Why
is it that the most direct indicator of self-consciousness
combined with rational, abstract cognition, seems to be the
capacity for horror, and how is it the case that this condition
can only be signified aesthetically through its embodiment
in a victim? Most perplexingly - and, as will be revealed
through this meditation upon Horror, most horrifically -
why do the perpetrators of Horror, the 'monsters', exert
such an attraction upon self-conscious beings that they
violate not only their victims but also the boundaries of
their own genre, ultimately to become not only figures
of fun and fantasy, and occasionally figures of awe and
wonder in the frequent cases of religions of the monstrous
or terrible, but even role-models which provide for some
not only escapist pleasure, but a guide to life?

I. Exaltation of the Victim

Impaled on towering spikes, the victims of Vlad Tepes
- Dracula - make apt examples of Horror's veneration of
the violated. Is it any coincidence that the larger-than-life
heroine-victims of the screen Dracula are likewise exalted
figures? The horror is not merely one of possible identifica-
tion with the damsel or hero threatened by the monstrous
being; the work of Lovecraft is an excellent indication of

33

COLLAPSE IV

this, desexualized as it is, and with characters stripped down
to being bare instruments of perception, as Houellebecq
points out in his thorough study of Lovecraftian horror. 3
Yet Lovecraft's depictions of violated observers whose
very perceptions are impaled by an intrusive, inescapably
bizarre alien otherness, do have something in common with
cinematic preferences for innocent feminine youth across
a genre inclusive of innumerable ladies of monstrous fate,
murderous fate (Vivian Leigh, screen avatar of a victim
conceived by an author deeply influenced by Lovecraft,
Robert Bloch), demonic violation (Linda Blair, whose
diabolical inhabitant was not merely a standard horned
scaly devil a la Dante or Bosch, but in fact was identified
in the Exorcist film tradition as the hideous disease-demon
Pazuzu, a Mesopotamian entity worthy of Lovecraft's Mad
Arab necromancer Al-Hazred and his Necronomkori), or
demonic seduction and subversion (Mia Farrow, mother of
Rosemary s Baby, offspring of Satan himself) . Hidden within
the obscure commonality here discerned is further gnosis of
horror: let us vivisect it, and see.

Whether male or female, the ideal victim of horror is
innocent, as regards the horror. This is not just in the usual
analogical sense of being undeserving of their torment (for
while many victims of fictional horror are not innocent of
all wrongdoing, none could possibly deserve exactly what
befalls them) but in the literal sense of previously having no
g7zo.su of it. Indeed, in Lovecraft's work, it is the horrifying
knowledge which is often itself the source of the awful conse-
quences befalling the victim. Likewise, victims of demonic

3. Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against tlie World, Against Life (London:
Weidenfield and Nicolson, 2006), 57-62, 69. (First published as H.P. Lovecraft: Contre
k monde, contre le vie [Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1991]).

34

Sieg-

Infinite Regress

possession may theoretically have done something to invite
the demon in, but do not have the 'gnosis' of it ... until it
arrives. At which point it is too late to forget, or to banish
the knowledge. But if horror is an emotion particular only
to abstract, reasoning self-consciousnesses, why don't the
victims 'deserve' what transpires, especially if they are guilty
of something? It seems that one of the reasons that reason is
required for horror, is that it is precisely reason which, in
being violated, produces the experience of horror. Hence,
the purest horror - 'concept-horror' - in which it is some
concept which proves to be the most horrifying of all.

Before seeking out the most archaic formulae of such
'concept-horror', let us continue the autopsy of the horror
victim. The archetypical possessed horror victim (as well
as the favoured 'Satanic' sacrifice), a virgin young girl, is
in-nocent by definition - and often expected, colloquially at
least, to be blond and pretty. The significance of this, beyond
the aesthetic, will be peeled back later as this morbid inquiry
proceeds. It is worth inquiring: is involuntary possession
always horrible? What about the identity of the possession
victim? Even the lacklustre Exorcist prequel (still technically
a horror film despite its heavy reliance on terror), set in
Africa, ends up requiring the demon to eventually possess
a European female presented as an object of desire in the
course of the story. How would such a possession film fare
if all the possession victims were of African identity and
undefined desirability? The zombies in Mght of the Living
Dead are most successful in their assaults on innocent
young women, and survived only by the black hero of the
film who is finally killed when the white mob purging the
zombies miscodes him as ... one of the monsters.

35

COLLAPSE IV

Leaving demons and victims of miscoding aside,
further insight into the realm of horror lies in the
characterization of one of the most classic horror motifs:
the standard vampire-victim (or vampire love-interest).
He or she begins as innocent of the vampiric reality, even if
not virginal. Is it horrific for a vampire to prey on another
vampire? Yet there is a certain commonality between the
vampire, whether male or female, and its prey; the prey
is likewise pale, often presented as attractive - fitted to
be turned into a vampire, in fact. What about the victims
of other, more inhuman, horrible monsters? While such
creatures will sometimes kill indiscriminately (especially
in 'terror' films as opposed to horror proper), they do
seem to have an unusual taste for devouring the civilized,
the self-aware, the rational: victims who are particularly
innocent of the creatures' visceral realm. Even when the
jungle-beast or the tentacle-monster starts eating its way
through its own natives or cultists - is this alone horrific?
Not enough to make a horror film out of it. Even the horror
of the murder victim, in order to survive in the realm of
more realist horror fiction, seems to share the signal traits:
either innocence of unavoidably fitting the criteria of 'victim',
until it is too late; or the equally horrible foreknowledge
of unavoidably fitting that criteria; innocence of the world
(physical, moral, or conceptual) from whence the horrible
murderer/monster originates; and again, a cultural and
racial type frequently associated with, or perhaps conflated
with, 'purity'.

Why should this particular type of victim find itself
exalted through an entire genre which is not even so specifi-
cally jealous of its own monstrous protagonists? And how
does this relate to the conceptual nature of horror?

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II. Reality is Horror: The First Aryan Lie

Of all variations on the theme of horror, what has come
to be known as Lovecraftian horror is indeed the most
conceptual. In some cases, Lovecraft's clinical descriptions of
the utterly alien and bizarre juxtaposed with the inability of
his protagonists (mere projections of the perceptive faculty)
to ignore or turn away until it is too late, suffice to produce far
greater horror than any description of their actual physical
violation could hope to do. As Houellebecq points out,
this is one reason why Lovecraftian horror is so difficult to
portray through visual media, 4 though as this examination
will show, the variable manifestations of horror all have
an unexpectedly common conceptual trait despite their
differences in regard to content. An interesting exception
to the general rule that Lovecraftian films wind up being
merely fantastic rather than horrible, is John Carpenter's
1995 In the Mouth of Madness. It manages to convey Love-
craftian horror through an almost excessively self-referen-
tial structure and plot: instead of being a Lovecraft story
transplanted into a modern setting, it features as antagonist
an author representing a sort of combination of Lovecraft
himself and his dark prophet Nyarlathotep, whose work
begins horrifically to be reflected in reality following his
mysterious disappearance. One of the most memorable,
and horrifying, scenes in the film involves the investigating
detective trapped in a cinema watching a film that begins
to depict him being assaulted by creatures reminiscent of
Lovecraft's story Dagon. Despite the usual unfilmability of
Lovecraft's eldritch horrors, In the Month of Madness captures
the inescapable violation of perception, reason, and sanity
which occurs in the stories, by actually using the context

4. Houellebe

iU-iU.

37

COLLAPSE IV

of film itself to reflect the self-referential, self-conscious
nature of horror, when visual depictions are called for. At
the same time, the constant use of embedded Lovecraft
quotations, ostensibly 'fictional' even within the realm of
the film, as part of the plot of the story itself, lends the film a
quality of impossibility and madness which is a hallmark of
Lovecraft's work. Outside the horror genre proper, a similar
technique was utilized in David Cronenberg's adaptation of
William Burroughs's Naked Lunch by including the bizarre
events presaging and during the writing of the book in the
plot of the film itself, thereby again using self-referentiality
to evade the Lovecraftian curse of unfilmability While the
book is surreal and often disgusting, some of the scenes in
the film, particularly those involving monstrous eroticism,
certainly approach horror, although that may not have
been the specific intent. Cronenberg's entire oeuvreis replete
with the imagery of 'bio-horror', in which the conceptual
boundaries of the flesh are violated and protagonists
become their own monstrous victims - as in The Fly -
demonstrating that the monster is not only 'interstitial', as
Carroll describes, 5 but is also an instance of 'incomplete
abjection', in Kristeva's sense. The conceptual boundaries
of the bodily self are horrifically violated not just through
destruction or even invasion, but ultimately through an
inability to separate from a body that itself becomes alien. 6
As a final example, Hitchcock's films, whether suspense or
horror, tend to involve frequent, if subtle, self-reference to
the eye as instrument of perception, the camera as avatar
of the viewer's inability to cease looking and therefore

5. Carroll, 31-39.

6. Bio-horror is thoroughly examined throughout Jack Morgan, The Biology of Horror:
Gothic Literature and Film {Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002).

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recording what is perceived (however horrible), or
occasionally, to the staged or dramatic quality of events.

Considering the abstract nature of such perceptual
'concept' horror as is particularly present in Lovecraft's
work, is there any indication that his personal and aesthetic
preferences, such as his Aryan racism as revealed throughout
his personal biography and correspondence, 7 contribute
significantly to the content of his work? Sufficient inves-
tigation has been done by others in exhaustive considera-
tion of the role of miscegenation in Lovecraft's cosmology,
as well as his representation of inhuman, meaningless,
blind cosmic Life through unnameable and indescrib-
able 'outer' horrors, to establish that there is a certain
analogy between the 'penetration' of the Aryan purity
by 'hideous', alien, foreign elements, and the penetration
of hapless Anglo-Saxon professors by tentacled predators
from Outside their known reality 8 This necessitates a
corresponding examination of the philosophical ramifica-
tions of Aryan racism in the context of horror, or at least
a consideration of whether such an element is indeed indis-
pensable to Lovecraftian horror. But if so, is it indispensable
to the whole horror genre? Or even to Horror itself? The
intrusive, stark, 'inconceivable reality' of the concentration

7. In reference to New York, Lovecraft wrote in a letter: 'The organic things — Italo-
Semitico-Mongoloid — inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the
imagination be call'd human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of
the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous
slime of earth's corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets.
[. . .] They — or the gelatinous fermentation of which they were composed — seemed
to ooze, seep and trickle thro' the gaping cracks in the horrible houses [. ..] and I
drought of [...] unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting point with gangrenous
vileness.' This description could, taken out of context, just as plausibly be guessed as
an extract from an obscure Lovecraft tale concerning the miscegenated progeny of
some horrific elder or outer things.

8. e.g.Joshi, 74-80, 12045.

39

COLLAPSE IV

camp as often remarked upon by both scholars of modern
evil and the Holocaust itself seems to attest that Horror is
inseparable from Aryan racism, so investigating this rela-
tionship of dependence from another vantage may prove
revealing.

The first Aryans to conceive of absolute horror, the
Zoroastrian dualists of prehistoric Iran, found its origins
in the Mother of Abomination, Drug, later known as
Druj, whose name comprises both what we would know
as a 'drag-on' and also what might best be conceived as a
'simulation', a corruption of reality, whether in the form of
a strategic dissimulation, a false affirmation, or an outright
physical blackening as of a decomposing corpse. The word
is usually translated simply as 'Lie', and was also used in
the context of betrayal, such as, of an oath, promise, or
contract. Why these Aiyans in Iran as the originators of a
concept of intrusive, infested, parasitic horror, propagating
itself upon and within a host innocent of its nature? The
Druj, mother of all demons and of the Devil himself,
originally an abstraction, a conceptual evil knowledge, the
Angstful Mind, reaches out from her primordial, prehistoric
Middle-Eastern domain to eventually rip herself free from
the stomachs of Aryan astronauts in Geigeresque, cinematic
form as the 'alien'. Like the 'alien Mother', the Druj is
horrifically and monstrously interstitial - She is fecund,
yet death-producing; female, yet signified by masculine
intrusiveness. She penetrates and violates like a rapist,
yet she is an endless womb of darkness and depravity 9

9. For extensive comments on femininity and gender-transgression in horror, see
Cynthia Freeland, The Naked and the Uitdead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder:
Westview, 1999). See also Barbara Creed's essay, 'Horror and the Monstrous
Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection', for an apt description of an 'archaic, phallic
mother' reminiscent of Druj, with the Angra Mainyu as her surrogate 'male
component'.

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What, then, was the origin of this power - the power not
of an 'image', but of a concept of parasitic, infectious disease-
horror - over the cultural (and perhaps even philosoph-
ical) mind of the Zoroastrian Aryan, making him the very
inventor of the concept of evil?

The Aryans in Iran, unlike their Vedic peers and
Lovecraft both, would not seem to have had obvious justi-
fication for elaborating a traditional ethnic xenophobia
into full-blown moral paranoia. The Brahmins were faced
with an indigenous population whose dominant genetic
traits have been proven by history to be mightier than
their Aryocentric anti-miscegenation law codes. In parallel,
Lovecraft was driven from New York by the dominant,
successful immigrant populations. As we know, he found
this experience horrific, yet in contrast, any expected
'horror' on the part of the Brahmins for the dark non- Aryan
people seems to have been notably absent in India. Black
Kali herself, whether an Aryan death goddess, as some
claim, or the terrible indigenous mother herself, inspires
simultaneous awe and terror, but not horror. The mixing of
castes and the Kali-yuga, inspired woe or detached sorrow
in the pure Aryans - but not horror. The Aryans in Iran,
by contrast, were apparently the sole inhabitants of a desert
plateau, and thus without significant competition, their
recessive traits secure until Arab invasions millennia later.
Lest it be suggested that a lack of racial competition turned
their conflict-obsessed, warlike selves against each other
until the prophet Zoroaster invented his horrors merely as
a foil to produce cultural unity, the reader should only need
to be reminded of northern Europe, which occupied itself
quite consistently in a constant state of unremitting tribal
warfare throughout its entire history until it was Christian-
ized, uninterrupted by anything like a gnosis of horror,

41

COLLAPSE IV

conceptual, racial, or otherwise.

It can only be that, for reasons unknown (perhaps
reasons sufficiently horrific that, as in the case of Great
Cthulhu and the Lovecraftian Old Ones, it may be more
wholesome not to know), the Aryans in Iran encountered, or
believed themselves to have encountered, a threat perceived
to be sufficiently difficult to distinguish from themselves
that it was, or might be, within. 10 The requisite condition
for absolute horror is presented: inescapable dread, a factor
which would produce constant terror - except that flight
is not only impossible, but inconceivable. Conceptual
horror enshrined in philosophy was then born in Iran as
the Mother of Abominations. It is no exaggeration to say
that by the time the moral dualism of the Zoroastrians was
fully cosmologically and performatively elaborated in the
Vendidad, their book of ritual codes and taboos against
the devils, their obsession with purity - the exaltation of
themselves as potential victims of intrusive, penetrative
violation by Druj and her ravenous children - had reached
proportions so extreme that the same ritual fixations outside
of an excusably cultural or religious context would now
earn a diagnosis of paranoid-schizophrenia with combined
obsessive-compulsive disorder, or worse. The Vendidad is a
study in terror if not outright horror itself. Each 'Fargard',
or chapter, recites repetitively and thoroughly the number

10. Lovecraft himself speculated on a similar process involving fear of hidden, internal
others in European tradition, writing in his classic study Supernatural Horror in Literature
{NY: Dover, 1973), 'Much of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due
to the hidden but often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshipers
whose strange customs were rooted in the most revolting fertility rites of immemorial
antiquity. This secret religion, stealthily handed down among peasants for thousands
of years despite the outward reign of Druidic, Greco-Roman, and Christian faiths in
the regions involved, was marked by "Witches Sabbaths" [. ..] on Walpurgis Night
and Hallowe'en, the traditional breeding-seasons of the goats and sheep and cattle;
and became the source of vast riches of sorcery legend.'

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of strokes with the punishment whip a transgressor is to
receive for violating any of the minutiae of purity laws,
concerned with everything from moral conduct to the
compulsively precise handling of corpses in order to ensure
that the community and the natural world remain undefiled
by the naso-druj, the corpse-demon. Extreme infractions,
such as exposure of corpses to water or fire, result in the
transgressor being publicly flayed alive. Many interesting
technicalities of the Zoroastrian hygiene obsession can be
found in the Vendidad., such as the association of albinism
with uncleanness, and the rule that physicians-in-training
were to practice on those who worshipped the daevas so as to
avoid accidentally killing the faithful. Male homosexuality
is so abhorred that its practitioners are proclaimed in the
Vendidad to be demons incarnate. Sexual intercourse with
a menstruating woman is an offense against purity worthy
of death. Eventually, for the Zoroastrians, any being of
evil thoughts, or an evil mind, might be a vehicle for Druj.
This does not only include representatives of any other
creed whatsoever: even those who outwardly professed the
Good Religion might secretly be 'endowed with the Lie'.
The incredible irony of Zoroastrianism is that the same
Aryan trait of xenophobia which made the ancient Iranians
amenable to this most paranoid of all world-views had to be
abandoned in order for the Zoroastrian creed of absolute
moral goodness in opposition to absolute moral evil to
be adopted. Once the Aryans adopted the Zoroastrian
religion, their enemies were not outsiders but any others (even
unrecognizable others in their midst, like Drujic 'body-
snatchers'), who carried the Lie. Even, and especially, fellow
Aryans - a notion inconceivable amongst any other Indo-
European group, none of which had any difficulty either
with feuding incessantly with each other indiscriminately,

43

COLLAPSE IV

or with uniting easily against even more foreign outsiders.
Yet the Iranians became the exception, and gave the world
the first universalist moral philosophy, ultimately
bequeathing it to the ancient Jews, who shared with the
Indo-European ancestors of the Aryans a xenophobic
racism, even while the Jews lacked those recessive genetic
traits the preservation of which, as signifiers of purity,
inspired a racialist concept amongst the Indo-Europeans
forgotten aeons ago.

A comparison of the Druj to the Old Ones of the
Lovecraftian mythos is intriguing, for while both concepts
were invented by racists, the inventors of the former
ceased to be racist as soon as they conceived their horror,
whilst Lovecraft became only more vitriolic with time
and exposure to foreign people. The principal difference
is easily summarized: the Druj was considered to be evil,
whilst Cthulhu, Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, and all their
various spawn, are simply alien. (In this, the Geigeresque
cinema 'alien' is more Lovecraftian than Zoroastrian, yet as
the quasi-androgynous-yet-penetrating 'demon-child' of the
Alien Mother it functions much as do the daevic offspring
of Druj. Unlike Lovecraft's Outer Ones, it is susceptible to
physical, material defeat in a modern combat myth, and
by a very un-Lovecraftian heroine who defends the moral
world order against violation by both the alien outsider,
and the 'Drujic' simulation-strategy of the nefarious
corporation and its android agent. Perhaps more Lovecraf-
tian in effect than Ripley's 'alien' nemesis is Norman Bates,
- 'possessed by the Druj', the 'lie' of his mother, yet in that
very sense his own victim and his own monster, even as he
butchers his victim, who finds the purifying waters of the
shower no refuge from asexual penetration by the avatar of

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the Outside). Lovecraft's own universe, in contrast to both
of those visions, is a horrifically amoral one. The rational
perceiver cannot escape the immeasurable, futile, imbecile
meaninglessness of the blind cosmos, and is devoured by it.
Yet the Zoroastrian believes that through morality (Good
Thoughts, Good Words, and Good Deeds), the Druj and
her children can be overcome. Ironically, in doing so, the
Zoroastrian remains Aryan' in name only, abandoning
the signifying trait of racial xenophobia which Lovecraft
himself maintained - even through the absolute materialism
consistently apparent in the same correspondence in which
he expresses his racist views. This is not mere coincidence.
Rather, it plainly demonstrates an inescapable Aryan truth'
which is perhaps the Aryan horror': As long as the Aryan
identifies in any meaningful way with ethnic traits which are
constantly genetically embattled by competing populations,
the capacity for perceiving a world of unremitting conceptual
horror remains. This observation, however, fails to account
for why Lovecraft elaborated, under the influence of his
racial obsessions, a cosmology of absolute horror, while his
equally race-obsessed Brahmin counterparts by contrast
in fact ultimately presented a cosmology of all-pervading,
triumphal wonderment and awe. Simultaneously, the
Brahmins' Iranian cousins, originally equally xenophobic,
chose to maintain their paranoia through moralism - at
the cost of their ethnic fixation. It is Lovecraft's philosoph-
ical materialism which settles the matter: both the Indian
Brahmins and the Iranians maintained cultural beliefs in a
spiritual realm independent of the material world. Lovecraft
did not. 11

It is interesting to note that the first Aryan Truth' of
Gotama Buddha, who rose to prominence during an age of

ll.Joshi, 7-45.

45

COLLAPSE IV

increasing Indian rationalism and critical thinking, was that
all life is pervaded with suffering, rendering theism irrelevant.
For Lovecraft, thoroughly atheistic and avowedly soulless,
it was not just suffering, but utter horror. Yet his ultimate
rejection of the opportunity to write Nazi propaganda in
the pre-war decade, and his rejection of Nazi atrocity and
genocide, demonstrates something else: while Lovecraft's
cosmos was a brutal one, he was not himself maltheistic 12

12. In contrast to dystlieism, which merely supposes that the deity is not good, maltlieism
proposes that the deity is actively and intentionally malicious. It should be noted
that neither of those alternatives specify whether or not it is advisable to venerate
the deity in question. The Zoroastrian Church condemned two maltheistic sects,
one of which, called the daeuayasiia, was accused of venerating the Druj, Ahriman,
and the daevas apotropeically - that is, with the intent to placate or banish them. The
other sect, that of the yatukih sorcerers, was accused of actively honoring the evil
principles with the intent to gain power from doing so: the original example of what
the Christian world knows as the 'pact with the Devil'. It remains unclear whether or
not the yatukih also recognized the existence of a 'good' deity opposing Ahriman and
the Druj, and if so, whether they ignored him, or actively opposed him. (Or whether
they acknowledged him as good at all). It seems that the Lovecraftian cults of the
Old Ones would qualify as maltheistic only in the 'Derleth recension' of the Cthulhu
Mythos, since only that later, dualized version of Lovecraft's cosmology promotes
the Elder Gods as moral opponents of the Old Ones. It may be possible to consider
some forms of monotheism to be necessarily maltheistic, when an understanding
of the god is offered in which its omnipotence (or ultra-potence, in cases in which
it is more powerful than any other being or beings combined, but not actually all-
powerful) is not only greater than its benevolence, but uncompromised with any
notion of benevolence whatsoever. Within such possible monotheistic conceptions
of a non-benevolent god who is either the only god or the supreme one, a further
distinction may perhaps be drawn between apotropaic maltlieism, in which the god or
deity is venerated in the hope that its malefic attention may be turned away, contractual
maltlieism, in which the power is venerated in order to increase one's standing, stature,
or power within its reality or domain, and latreic maltlieism, in which it is actively
worshipped or adored in a sort of religious Stockholm-syndrome, a compulsive
response to its irresistible but awful or malign numinosity. A sub-category of latreic
maltlieism might be propitiatory maltlieism, in which it is supposed that the malice of the
divine being can be mollified in some way even if not actively averted, as in the case
of apotropeic maltlieism. It should be noted that this typology of maltlieism could
easily be mirrored with reference to dystheistic demon-cults in which destructive (but
not intentionally malicious) powers are venerated for the aims or reasons described.
The disease-demon Pazuzu, for example, was viewed as dangerously destructive
most of the time, as was the even more feared child-slaying Lamashtu, but there is

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enough to embrace such a conception with participatory
enthusiasm. 13 He did not want to contribute to the world
of horrors; rather, he rejected life. If he had believed in a
soul, he would have been a Gnostic dualist, but even this
option was closed to him in his atheistic materialism. (The
Gnostics, while rejecting the supposedly-divine 'archons',
the spiritual creators of, and rulers of, the material world
of horrors, asserted an all-Good, all-perfect, spiritual
reality of divine emanations beyond it; an option totally
unacceptable to Lovecraft's materialistic 'cosmicism'). 14

no indication that either one was understood to murder human beings sadistically
or for the purpose of deriving pleasure specifically from harming people. In this
sense, the difference between dystheism and maltlieism could be likened to the
difference between honoring man-eating beasts (or an advanced race of amoral extra-
terrestrials, for a more 'godlike' analogy) and honoring serial or mass -murderers (or,
to continue the analogy of 'advanced' beings, a race of creature that hunts human
i for sport or pleasure).

13. While it might be considered questionable to assert that the Nazi philosophy
is maltheistic since 'Providence' or the 'Gott-force' in Nature was understood by
the Nazis to support Aryans and cause them to flourish, it would certainly have
been perceived as maltheistic by Lovecraft. He was married to a Jewish woman,
reviled violence and cruelty, and was too materialistic to have considered theological
justifications for killing as are found in the Bhagauad-Gita, in which the god Krishna
reveals to the story's protagonist that he should have no regret over killing even
those for whom he feels respect or affection since all beings are merely projections of
an ultimately indestructible Self. Himmler was reported to have frequently carried a
translation of this text - and was presumably not, for this reason, a maltheist, despite
his affection for the imagery of death. The ideology of those Jews who willingly
cooperated with the Nazi regime (especially any who cooperated with the SS) could
easily have been described as one of the forms of maltlieism proposed above, however,
particularly in cases wherein the plight of the Jews was understood to have been sent
as divine retribution, since modern Jews, unlike their ancient predecessors, generally
regard Yahweh as omnipotent (thanks to Zoroastrian influence identifying Yahweh
with the omnipotent Zoroastrian god, Ahura Mazda, subsequent to their liberation
by Cyrus the Great and his Zoroastrian Persians, from captivity in Babylon). It
is perhaps this potential for maltlieism within monotheism that led to the famous
'trial of God in Auschwitz' account of Elie Wiesel, and the various elaborations of
'Holocaust theology' in modern Judaism.

14. Ironically, the earliest Gnostics themselves seem to have been Hellenized
Alexandrian Jews, probably expatriate in the wake of the second Jewish revolt under

47

COLLAPSE IV

The Zoroastrians, however, maintained their spiritual
beliefs despite their conception of the 'life-horror' of Druj.
They only conceived of such horror in the absence of the
simple othering process that gave rise to the Vedic caste
system, or the assimilation of local populations that char-
acterized the gradual Indo-European drift into Europe.
Instead, whatever ethnic or cultural influences threatened
the ancient Iranians, these threats must have been
perceived as outwardly indistinguishable from the Aryan
population, requiring a new concept in order to maintain
Aiyan self-other polarity. That concept: horror - mother
of absolute dualism; as Druj, Mother of Abominations. In
identifying that which was 'other' than the ambiguity of
the life of flesh, the Zoroastrians also invented the Iranian
version of the Indo-European cognitive dualism. In contrast
to societies of gradual, graduated ethnic mixture wherein this
perspective manifested as mind-body dualism, in apparently
homogenous Iran, it manifested as moral dualism. Instead of
an escape from the embodied world, as sought by Orphics,
Gnostics, and yogis alike, the Zoroastrians conceived of
immortal youth in a perfected, resurrected body, inhabiting
an eternally perfected world of monotonous, sterile
cleanliness and light, given to Ahura Mazda's faithful as
a reward for moral behaviour. For Lovecraft, materialist
that he was, no such solace could be found either in

Trajan, who particularly reviled the God of Israel as an evil 'demiurge'. See Carl B.
Smith II, Mo Longer Jews: Tlw Searchfor Gnostic Origins {Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004),
for details. They generally abominated the whole material cosmos, but proposed a
transcendent spiritual escape, in a manner similar to the renunciation of the round of
rebirth by Indian philosophers seeking liberation, and to the earlier Orphic mystics.
While all these philosophies share in common an origin in the collision of Indo-
European and non-Indo-European cultural patterns, only Gnosticism seems to have
originated amongst people who were themselves an ethnic out-group within an Indo-
European society - and it is only Gnosticism which proposes not only a binding and
malignant material world, but a malicious creator-god as its origin.

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spiritual transcendence or eternal life through resurrection.
In a great biographical and historical double irony,
Lovecraft the racist married a Jewish woman, Sonia
Greene, exempting her from his xenophobic tirades - yet
his materialism historically descended from a rationalistic
response toJudaeo-Christianity the offspring of Zoroastrian
dualism and Semitic culture.

III. Purity

There can be no reversing the unique tragedy of the
Holocaust. It must be remembered, with shame and
horror, for as long as human memory continues. Only
by remembering can we pay fitting tribute to the victims.
(UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, observing International
Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2006, anniversary
of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Soviets.)

Now archetypal symbols of human evil, often regarded
as actually living embodiments of absolute horror, the
Nazis are strangely absent from fictional horror, while their
presence (or their equivalent, such as Palpatine's Galactic
Empire of Star Wars fame) is surreally commonplace
alongside various more eldritch monsters in the annals of
fantasy and science-fiction. Additionally, Occult Nazism is a
staple of fringe conspiracy lore and pseudo-esoteric crypto-
history and Nazi super-villains and super-sorcerers of some
variety are by no means infrequent adversaries in occult
fiction and suspense thrillers. This alone is peculiar, since
surely the Nazis are regarded as infinitely more horrific, in
carnal reality, than any serial murderer one could name -
yet not a single horror-genre film of any significance has ever
featured someone racially motivated to prey on non- Aryan
victims, much less featured an actual Nazi as its antagonist.

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COLLAPSE IV

(The infamous 'Nazi exploitation' genre of course excepted
- save that it qualifies more as pornography than horror.)
More peculiar still is the occasional association, in occult
and fantasy/science-fiction, of said Nazi super-villains with
black magic, 'Satanic' rites, and the conjuration of terrible
ancient monstrosities blatantly reminiscent of Lovecraft's
Mythos. (The tentacled horrors emerging from the abyss
in the Hellboy comics and films with the assistance of Nazi
sorcerers and Rasputin serve as an excellent example.)
Beneath the apparently superficial aesthetic of the
pop-culture sensibility lurks something of significance: the
same perpetrators of violence and horror - whether evil
Nazis or Cthulhu monsters - are determined to be figures
of either horror or fantasy based specifically on the identities
of their victims. Thus, while Lovecraft's violated professors
are often stripped of all significant personality and traits,
even of any references to sexuality, they remain Anglo-Saxon
professors, horrified by the miscegenated, bestial realities
they confront. In fact, so long as they are not engaged in
the violation of Lovecraft's ideal Aiyan scientists (modeled
more or less after himself), the very same tentacular Old
Ones somehow desist from being figures of actual horror,
instead crossing genres and winding up being summoned
for genocidal purposes by more murderous Germanic
professors in the vein of Mengele and Himmler, whose
racial sensibilities, if not their ethics, Lovecraft embraced. It
would seem that horror as it is generally appreciated within
contemporary culture not only requires victims identifiable
with the originating ethno -cultural group, but also depends
upon the total disassociation of the monster from possible
identification with such victims. That is, horror requires
both a Zoroastrian dualism, and the maintenance (at least
cryptically) of the racialism the Zoroastrians themselves

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rejected in order to avoid the horror. The work of Lovecraft
represents a striking testament to the fact that, from the
perspective of the Aryan racist, the manifest physical
world is a whole world of horror, a reality not just of terrible
strife, or frightful competition for resources, but indeed an
inescapably dreadful experience of invasion from without.

This phenomenon of belief provides further demonstra-
tion that the Nazi preoccupation with Jewish materialism'
and with the supposedly insidious nature of Jewish
sexuality as virally infecting, perverting, and corrupting the
otherwise pure German race, was by no means an artifact of
Christian morality combined with political expedience. For
the Zoroastrian Iranians also displayed a paranoid response
to confrontation with influences perceived as invasive from
without and hidden within. The Nazis, however, despite
all their dualistic propaganda, rejected the solution of
moral dualism, preferring instead consciously and willfully
to become embodied perpetrators of absolute horror
upon their presumed infiltrators. While Nazi propaganda
depicted Jews in verminous terms, and displayed the octo-
pus-tentacles of the Elders of Zion insinuating themselves
upon defenseless globes and world-maps, the Nazis did not
depictjews as externally menacing, mighty demonic beings
with huge armies of Satanic devils at their disposal, capable
of opposing the Aryan legions on equal footing. While the
Nazis presented the 'hordes' from the Communist east as
threatening mobs of 'sub-humans', such mobs were certainly
not depicted as mythically comparable to the bewitching
majesty of the Angstful Mind and all the monstrous and
terrible children of the Druj. Stalin was no Ahriman, at least
not to the Nazis. Rather, the self-proclaimed elite of the Nazi
party, Himmler's SS, reveled in its own imagery of death,

51

COLLAPSE IV

and glorified in the extermination not of mighty evil foes,
but of weakness, both in themselves and in others. In simple
terms, they chose to act the part of their own monsters. It
is an irony of history and human thought that the Nazis'
chosen victims had become the world's most loathed yet
sometimes venerated ethnic group aeons previously, only
after combining their own xenophobia with a moral dualism
invented by Iranian Aryans for the purpose of adapting
their own racism to an as yet unidentified, invisible enemy.
Yet, despite the clearly monstrous nature of Nazi policy,
Heinrich Himmler is often quoted as remarking that the
real Nazi 'triumph' lay in their performance of horrific
deeds while remaining otherwise humane and uncorrupt -
at least in their own minds, the SS represented less a Stock-
holm-syndrome style identification with and veneration
of 'life-as-horror', and more an attempt to somehow buy
off 'life-horror' through mass offerings of victims rendered
suitable due to the Jewish adoption of post- Aryan moral
dualism as an ethical philosophy augmenting the Jews' pre-
existent ethnic exclusivism.

Still, even as the Nazis remain the most morally
demonized of all possible monsters, the exaltation of the
pure white victim remains consistent and genre-inviolable:
evil as the Nazi may be, the monster violating the same
lovely blondes who could well be the Nazi ideal of beauty,
is horrible. Lest the association of arcane horrors with
monstrous-Aryans-gone-bad (rather than Aryan victims
violated) be thought a post-war consequence, consider that
Dracula, the vampiric horror icon, is based on a figure of
Romanian history considered a local hero of Christendom,
utilizing the horror of impalement as a deterrent against
invasion by foreign others, the non-Aryan Turks. Even the

52

Sieg-

Infinite Regress

Zoroastrians were racist, albeit sporadically, when fighting
Central Asian adversaries. Lovecraft was not beyond re-ap-
propriating monstrous imageries in a non-horrific context to
make his racist point. His pentacular Great Old Ones with
their asexual lost civilization, eventually overthrown by their
own decadent progeny, resonate in strange kinship with the
human researchers who discover their remains beneath
the Antarctic ice - a closer kinship than those researchers
would have had to fellow humans whom Lovecraft would
have called 'inferior stock'. Such a demonstration of the
ultimate identification of the monstrous with Aryan purity
need not be considered completely tangential in Lovecraft's
work, however. In one of his more unusual tales, somehow
one of wonder and horror simultaneously, Lovecraft's bare
instrument of perception, the narrator, discovers itself to be
the monster. In this short story is collapsed and compressed
the full gnosis of the Aiyan truth of horror, ultimate originator
of both the moral dualism and the renewed Aryan dualism
of absolute racial superiority, and of self-victimization, as
an antidote to perceived weakness. The purest form of
conceptual horror is the realization of inescapable identity
with the monstrous perception - the concept - which is
both the object and source of horror. Yet, when that object
of horror is also the subject, the instrument of perception,
wave upon wave of self-referential, cascading horror is the
result. Zoroastrian dualism provides one solution - a 'good'
spiritual identity for the self, an 'evil' spiritual identity for
the other, horrific only in 'this world'. Nazi racism provides
the other solution - 'evil' deeds of horror performed by
the self as a displacement of the horror of invasion by the
other, the pure becoming the monstrous: the self-exalted
victim, the now-monstrous Aryan; the reality victim, the
scapegoated Jew. For Lovecraft, though, as for any Aryanist

53

COLLAPSE IV

materialist, there was no solution or escape from the horror,
as becoming the monster through deliberate identification is
hardly an option for the extreme reductionist. For him, life
is a conceptual nightmare with only the void of an empty
consciousness as contrast.

54

COLLAPSE IV

Nine Disputations on
Theology and Horror

Eugene Thacker

1. After-Life

Ever since Aristotle distinguished the living from the
non-living in terms of psukke - commonly translated as
'soul' or 'life-principle' - the concept of 'life' has itself been
defined by a duplicity - at once self-evident and yet opaque,
capable of categorization and capable of further mystifica-
tion. This duplicity is related to a another one, namely, that
there are also two Aristotles - Aristotle-the-metaphysician,
rationalizing psukhe, form, and causality, and Aristotle-the-
biologist, observing natural processes of 'generation and
corruption' and ordering the 'parts of animals'.

Arguably, the question of life is the burning question of
the contemporary era, one in which life is everywhere at
stake as 'bare life', one in which 'all politics is biopolitics'.
If the question of Being was the central issue for antiquity
(raised again by Heidegger), and if the question of God

55

COLLAPSE IV

- as alive or dead - was the central issue for modernity
(Kierkegaard, Nietzsche), then perhaps the central question
today is that of Life - the function of the concept of 'life
itself, the two-fold approach to life as at once scientific
and mystical, the return of vitalisms of all types, and the
pervasive politicization of life.

The question that runs through these brief disputatio
is the following: Can there be an ontology of 'life' that
does not immediately become a concern of either Being
or God? Put differently, if one accepts that the concept
of 'life' is irreducible to biology, what then is to prevent
it from becoming reducible to theology? Let us be even
more particular: To what extent is 'life' as a concept always
situated between a biology of a non-ontological 'life itself
and an onto-theology of the life-beyond-the-living, or
'after-life'?

But what comes 'after life'? Is it death, decay, and
decomposition, or is it resurrection and regeneration? Is it,
in biological terms, the transformation of the living into the
non-living, from the organic life of molecules to non-organic
matter? Or does it involve a theological re-vitalization of
the resurrected, living cadaver? In either case, the after-life
bears some relation to the 'during life' and the 'before life',
and it is precisely the ambiguity of these relationships that
has shaped the debates on mechanism and vitalism in the
philosophy of biology, as well as the earlier debates in Scho-
lasticism on the nature of creaturely life.

There is no better guide to the after-life than Dante. The
life of the after-life in the Commedia is a political theology,
at once rigidly structured and yet coursing with masses of
bodies, limbs, fluids, fires, rivers, minerals, and geometric
patterns of beatific light. In particular, the Inferno gives us

56

Thacker - Nine Disputations

several concise statements concerning the life of the after-life.
In the seventh circle, Dante and his guide Virgil come to
the 'burning desert', upon which a multitude of bodies are
strewn about. 1 Among them Dante and Virgil come across
Capaneus, one of the seven kings who assaulted Thebes
and defied the law of Jove. Capaneus lies stretched out on
the burning sand, a rain of fire descending upon him, while
he continues his curses against the sovereign. As Virgil
explains, Capaneus is one of the blasphemers, grouped
with the usurers and sodomites for their crimes against
God, State, and Nature. But, as with many of Dante's
depictions in the Inferno, there is no redemption, and the
punished are often far from being penitential. Their tired,
Promethean drama of revolt, defiance, and blasphemy goes
on for eternity.

It is easy to read such scenes in a highly anthropo-
morphic manner. But each individual 'shade' that Dante
encounters is also associated with a group or ensemble that
denotes a category of transgression, and this is especially
the case of Middle Hell. Upon entering the gates of the City
of Dis, Dante and Virgil are first confronted by a horde
of demons, and then by the Furies. Once they are able to
pass, they come upon a 'landscape of open graves', each
one burning and holding within it one of the Heretics. The
scene is visually depicted with great drama by Gustav Dore,
who, following the prior example of Botticelli, presents the
heretics as a mass of twisted, emaciated corpses emerging
from their graves. Along the way they also encounter a
river of bodies immersed in boiling blood (watched over by
a regiment of Centaurs), as well as the 'wood of suicides', in

1. Cf. XIV, 22-24: 'some souls were stretched out flat upon their backs, /others were
crouching there all tightly hunched,/some wandered, never stopping, round and
round' (I?i/er?io, trans. Mark Musa, Penguin, 1984; all citations refer to this edition).

57

COLLAPSE IV

which the bodies of the damned are fused with dead trees
(watched over by the Harpies) . Within many of the circles,
Dante encounters nothing but multiplicity - bustling crowds
(the Vestibule of the Indecisive), a cyclone of impassioned
bodies (Circle II, the Lustful), a sea of bodies devouring
each other (Circle IV, the Wrathful), dismembered bodies
(Circle VIII, the Sowers of Discord), and a field of bodies
ridden with leprosy (Circle VIII, the Falsifiers). The life-
after-life is not only a life of multiplicity, but it is also a life
in which the very concept of life continually negates itself,
a kind of vitalistic life-negation that results in the living dead
'citizens' of the City of Dis.

Perhaps, then, one should begin not by thinking about
any essence or principle of life, but by thinking about a
certain negation of life, a kind of life-after-life in which the
'after' is not temporal or sequential, but liminal.

2. Blasphemous Life

But we've forgotten about blasphemy. What is
blasphemy in regard to the forms of life-negation found
in the Inferno? Returning to the burning desert, Capaneus,
noticing Dante's inquiring gaze, shouts back to him: What I
was once, alive, I still am, dead!' 2 On one level this is simply
a descriptive statement - defiant towards divine sovereignty
in life, I remain so in the after-life. But surely Capaneus
realizes that, after life, resistance is futile? 3 Or have the
terms changed, after life? Perhaps his words do not mean
'I am still defiant' but rather, quite literally, something like

2. XIV, 51. An alternate edition by Mandelbaum translates 'Qual io fui vivo, tal son
morto' thus: 'That which I was in life, I am in death.'

3. Virgil notes as much, chastising Capaneus for continuing this tirade, his own
words becoming his own punishment.

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Thacker - Nine Disputations

'I am a living contradiction.' Such phrases denoting a living-
death recur in the Inferno, often spoken by Dante himself. 4
Perhaps, then, this phrase What I was once, alive, I am still
now' actually means - in the afterlife - that 'I am still living,
even in death.' This living contradiction - being living dead.
- is also linked to the political-theological contradiction
of a power that at once 'shuts down' as much as it 'lets
flow'. There is a kind of Medieval biopolitics in the Inferno
quite different from the modern, Foucauldian version.
The strange conjunction of sovereignty and multiplicity in
the Inferno does not demand the punishment of souls, but
instead requires a mass of animated, sensate, living bodies,
in some cases resulting in an almost medicalized concept of
the after-life (e.g. the Sowers of Discord are meticulously
dismembered, dissected, and anatomized). In tandem with
a sovereign 'shutting-down' we have also a kind of govern-
mental 'letting-flow' ; indeed, at several points the Inferno
seems to imply their isomorphism.

Blasphemy, then, can be viewed in this regard as the
assertion of living contradiction. But this assertion is not
simply a resistance to an authoritative demand to be non-
contradictory In its modern variants it strives to become
an ontological principle as well. Nowhere is this more
evident than in the 'weird biologies' of H.P Lovecraft's
At the Mountains of Madness. 5 The narrative describes two
kinds of blasphemous life. The first involves the discovery
of unknown fossils and a 'Cyclopean city' in the deep
Antarctic, both of which display 'monstrous perversions of

4. Upon seeing the bestial figure of Satan, Dante notes 'I did not die -I was not living
either!' (XXXIV, 25).

5. To this one might also add the creatures that inhabit William Hope Hodgson's The
Night Land as well as weird tales of authors such as Clark Ashton Smith and Frank
Belknap Long.

59

COLLAPSE IV

geometrical laws'. 6 The discovery leads to the remains of an
unrecognizable, intelligent species of 'Old Ones' that, in the
Lovecraftian mythos, are thought to have lived eons prior
to the earliest known human fossilized data. 7

But this only leads to a further revelation, in which
the explorers discover another type of life which they call
the Shoggoths and which seem to resemble formless yet
geometric patterns: 'viscous agglutinations of bubbling
cells - rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and
ductile - slaves of suggestion, builders of cities - more and
more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more
amphibious, more and more imitative [...] ' 8 In Lovecraft's
inimitable prose, the Shoggoths are the alterity of alterity
the species-of-no-species, the biological empty set. When
they are discovered to still be alive, they are described
sometimes as formless, black ooze, and sometimes as math-
ematical patterns of organic 'dots', and sometimes as a
hurling mass of viscous eyes. Formless, abstract, faceless.
In an oft-referenced passage, what the narrator expresses is
the horizon of the ability of the human characters to think
this kind of 'life':

When Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflec-
tively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those
headless bodies and stank obscenely with that new unknown
odor whose cause only a diseased fancy could envisage - clung

6. At the Mountains of Madness, in Tim Dreams In the Witch-House and Other Weird Stories, ed.
S.T. Joshi (New York: Penguin, 2004), 271.

7. One could easily imagine a re-casting of Quentin Meillassoux's 'arche-fossiT in
terms of the findings of the Miskatonic University Expedition. See William Dyer et
al., 'A Hypothesis Concerning Pre-Archaen Fossil Data Found Along the Ross Ice
Shelf, "Tlie New England Journal of Geological Science, 44. .2 (1936): 1-17.

8. At the Mountains of Madness, 330.

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Thacker - Nine Disputations

to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a smooth
part of the accursedly resculptured wall in a series of grouped
dots - we understood the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost
heights. 9

What Lovecraft puts forth in his tales of cosmic horror
is a form of blasphemy that is decidedly non-anthropomor-
phic and misanthropic. At the mountains of madness we
move from a concept of blasphemy as grounded in human
agency (the blasphemy of Capaneus in the underworld) to a
blasphemy of the unhuman ('more and more amphibious').
For Lovecraft, 'it' is blasphemous - but also indifferent,
incomprehensible, and in many cases unnamable ('the
thing', 'the doom', 'the fear', 'the whisperer').

At the center of blasphemous life is this idea of the
living contradiction. Blasphemous life is the life that is living but
that should not be living. This contradiction is not a contra-
diction in terms of medical science; the blasphemous life
can often be scientifically explained and yet remain utterly
incomprehensible. If it is a logical contradiction, it would
have to be one in which the existence of true contradictions
would not only be admitted, but would be foundational to
any ontology. In logical terms, the assertion that there are
true contradictions is often referred to as 'dialetheism'. 10 But
with Lovecraft we have a twist. The Shoggoths are bizarre
examples of dialethic biologies, contradictions that are living
precisely because they are contradictory, or 'blasphemous'.

9. Ibid, 331.

10. In its simplest form, dialetheism argues that for any proposition X, both Xand
not-X are true. Dialetheism therefore works against the Law of Non-Contradiction
(articulated in Aristotle's Metaphysics Gamma), but, in order to avoid accepting
absolute relativism, it must also accept some form of paraconsistent logic. For more
see Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Martinus: Nijhoff, 1987).

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COLLAPSE IV

Whereas for Dante the blasphemous is the living
contradiction - to be living in death, to be living after life
- for Lovecraft the blasphemous is the very inability to
think 'life' as a concept at all. Blasphemy is here rendered
as the unthinkable. To account for such blasphemous life,
one would have to either compromise existing categories of
thought, or entertain contradictory notions such as 'living
numbers' or 'pathological life'.

3. Ambient Plague

The anonymous 'it' of blasphemy is also expressed
in the hermeneutics of plague and pestilence. Our very
concepts regarding the disaster already betray a profound
anxiety. That some disasters are 'natural' while others are
not implies a hypothetical line between the disaster that can
be prevented (and thus controlled), and the disaster that
cannot. The case of infectious diseases is similar, except
that the agency or the activity of this 'biological disaster'
courses through human beings themselves - within bodies,
between bodies, and through the networks of global transit
and exchange that form bodies politic. In the U.S., the
two-fold conceptual apparatus of 'emerging infectious
diseases' (naturally-caused) and 'biodefense' (artificially-
caused) cloaks a generalized militarization of public health.
More fundamentally, when it becomes increasingly more
difficult to discern the epidemic from the bioweapon, entire
relations of enmity are re-cast. The threat is not simply
an enemy nation or terrorist group, the threat is itself
biological; biological life itself becomes the absolute enemy.
Life is weaponized against Life, resulting in an ambient
Angst towards the biological domain itself. 11

11. Cf. my article 'Biological Sovereignty' Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 17
(2006-7).

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Thacker - Nine Disputations

However, while it has become customary to view
epidemics in light of post-germ-theory 'autoimmuni-
tary' boundary disputes, there is a more fundamental
problem articulated in the pre-modern concept of plague
and pestilence, where biology and theology are always
intertwined in the concepts of contagion, corruption, and
pollution. 12 One of the central concerns of chroniclers
of the Black Death was that of causation, and how that
causation was interpreted in relation to the divine. 13 As
the Black Death spread throughout Medieval Europe, the
motif of the 'angry God' recurs in many of the chronicles,
both fictional and non-fictional. It forms a key framing-tool
for Boccaccio's Decameron, is a motif in Piers Plowman, and
it shapes the sub-genre of plague pamphlets in England. 14
These in turn make reference to the examples of Biblical
plague, of which the most well-known is the Ten Plagues
of Egypt, in which God sends down ten 'plagues' to
persuade the Egyptian pharaoh the free the Jewish people. 10

12. A great deal of the cultural theory surrounding epidemics has focused on its
modern, germ-theory context. Emily Martin's Flexible Bathes (Boston: Beacon, 1994)
and Laura Otis' Membranes {Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000),
provide views from anthropology and literary studies, respectively. Jacques Derrida
noted the way in which political conceptualizations of the enemy have, in a post-9/11
era, centered around autoimmune disorders, in which the threat comes from within.
See Giovanna Borradori and Jacques Derrida, Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic
Suicides - a Dialogue withjacques Derrida', in Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003). However, there is as much to learn from the pre-
modern discourse of plague and pestilence, which often de-emphasizes the ontology
of interior-exterior in favor of a theology of life and life-after-life.

13. For a survey, see the collection Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception
of Pestilence, edited by Terrence Ranger and Paul Slack (Cambridge University Press,
1992).

14. A particularly good example in this regard is William Bullein's mid-sixteenth
century plague pamphlet, A Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence.

15. Exodus 7:14-12:42.

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COLLAPSE IV

Here the 'plagues' do include epidemic disease, but also
rivers that turn into blood, swarms of insects, tempestual
storms, and an eclipse. Another, more common reference
among the Black Death chronicles is apocalyptic. Revelations,
with its dense and complex symbology tells of 'Seven
Angels' sent forth to deliver 'Seven Plagues' that are to
be 'poured' upon mankind as a form of divine judgment;
here again the 'plagues' range from contagious disease to
aberrations in livestock, the weather, and the destruction
of human cities. 16

In all these instances we see this key element: a
divine sovereign who, in the form of a judgment and/or
punishment, sends down - or better, emanates - a form of
miasmatic life that is indissociable from decay, decomposi-
tion, and death. What is noteworthy about the pre-modern
concept of plague and pestilence is not only its blurring
of biology and theology, but the profound lability that the
concepts of plague and pestilence have. In the chronicles
of the Black Death, plague seems to be at once a separate,
quasi-vitalized 'thing' and yet something that spreads in the
air, in a person's breath, on their clothes and belongings,
even in the glances between people. As one early chronicler
notes, 'one infected man could carry the poison to others,
and infect people and places with the disease by look
alone'. 17

It is tempting to understand the Medieval hermeneu-
tics of plague and pestilence as Neoplatonic - a supernat-
ural force emanating from a divine centre. However this
would require that we understand the relation between

16. Revelations 15-16.

17. Se
Death,

: the chronicle of Gabriele de Mussis, translated and collected in The Black
ed. Rosemary Horrox (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).

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Thacker - Nine Disputations

Creator and creatures as pathological, a divine sovereign
that emanates itself through a miasmatic diffusion of decay.
But what is being emanated here is not creation itself but
rather its opposite, a kind of de-creation that occupies the
underside of what Aristotle called 'passing away' (disease,
decay, decomposition). 18 This strange type of life, that
seems to emanate from a Neoplatonic One and diffuse itself
throughout creaturely life, cannot be understood without
taking into account another element. As varied as the
Medieval accounts of plague and pestilence are, one of the
common motifs, along with the angry God, is that of plague
and pestilence as a divine weapon. The divine sovereign
doesn't simply pass judgment; the sovereign weaponizes
life - the pathological life of 'plagues' - and turns it against
the earthly life of the creature, which is itself a product of
the divine will.

Arguably this motif has its roots in antiquity: in Hesiod,
for instance, we see how Zeus sends the 'gift' of plague-
ridden Pandora to Prometheus as a form of retribution;
likewise The Illiad opens with an angry Apollo sending
down 'arrows' of plague upon the armies of men for their
disrespect towards the gods. There are earthly instances of
this as well. An oft-mentioned example in this regard is the
Medieval practice of catapulting corpses. The primal scene
in this regard is the fourteenth-century Italian trading post
at Caffa, on the northern border of the Black Sea. Ongoing
skirmishes between Italian merchants and Muslim locals

18. The motif of decay has been picked up most recently by Reza Negarestani, who
discusses 'decay as a building process'. In a seminar given at Goldsmiths College,
Negarestani adopts two approaches to understanding the concept of decay - that
of mathematics (derived from Scholasticism as it developed at Oxford) and that of
architecture. There is much to expand upon here, particularly in the relation between
architecture and resurrection. The ruin may be one conceptual mediation between
them.

65

COLLAPSE IV

led, in one instance, to the catapulting of plague-ridden
corpses by the latter, over the fortress walls of the former. 19

All of this is to suggest that the political theology of
pestilence is not an issue of shutting-down or 'walling'. It
is, certainly, that, but only to an extent. For the pervasive,
diffuse, and circulatory quality of pestilence - this 'thing' or
'event' that is at once a divine emanation and yet a source of
social and political chaos - raises a more complex problem
for sovereign power: how to control the pervasiveness of pestilence
without losing control of the pervasiveness of people.

But it is not clear in the accounts of chroniclers, or in the
texts of Boccaccio, Chaucer, or Langland, if pestilence is that
which causes social and political disorder, or if pestilence is
continuous with this affective fantasy of total chaos. So we
have a strange situation in which pestilence, itself super-
naturally caused by a divine, primary sovereign power,
then elicits a host of exceptional measures by secondaiy,
earth-bound sovereign actors, in order to ward off the
pending and pervasive chaos that pestilence occasions -
which itself emanates from the primary, divine sovereignty
- the primum mobile of pestilence, as it were.

19. Here is De Mussis' account, which is thought by most historians to be second-
hand: 'The dying Tartars, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster
brought about by the disease, and realizing that they had no hope of escape, lost
interest in the siege. But they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed
into the city in tire hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside [...]
And soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the
stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position
to flee the remains of the Tartar army. No one knew, or could discover, a means of
defense'. In The Black Death, 17.

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Thacker - Nine Disputations

4. Nekros

However, it should not be forgotten that the weaponized
plague always targets a body or bodies. And what, indeed,
is the target of the living weapon, if not the living target -
that is, the corpse?

The concept of nekros has two significant meanings in
classical culture. On the one hand, nekros is the corpse or
the dead body. In the Odyssey, for instance, when Odysseus
organizes the funeral rites for one of his companions, it is
the nekros that is burned at the grave site: 'Once we'd burned
the dead man {nekros) and the dead man's {nekrou) armour,/
heaping his grave-mound, hauling a stone that coped it
well,/we planted his balanced oar aloft to crown his tomb.' 20
Certainly nekros names the singularity of the departed life,
or of life recently departed from the body, leaving behind
a corpse. But this corpse retains something residual of that
life, insofar as both the corpse and its armor are together
set upon the grave. We might even say that nekros not
only names the 'dead man', but also the thingness of the
corpse. In a sense nekros oscillates between the body-minus-
life and the thingness of the corpse, the latter approaching
the domain of the purely non-living (e.g., the armor as the
non-living body) .

However the Odyssey also contains another, more
significant usage of nekros. This comes in the well-known
passages recounting Odysseus' journey to the underworld.
In this scene Odysseus first performs a sacrificial rite that
calls to the dead, who then emerge from the underworld in
a kind of slow-motion swarming:

And once my vows and prayers had invoked the nations of
the dead (et/mea nekron), I took the victims, over the trench I

20. The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin), XII. 13-15.

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COLLAPSE IV

cut their throats and the dark blood flowed in - and up out of
Erebus they came, flocking toward me now, the ghosts of the
dead and gone (nekuon kataethneoton) 2 ^

Here nekros no longer names the corpse, nor even the
thingness of the corpse. Instead, nekros names something
alive, or at least vitalized - but in a way fundamentally
different from the life of we. Nekros as the corpse presumes
a reliable boundary between life and death, whereas nekros
as 'the dead' are characterized by an ambivalent vitalism.
These dead souls are detained souls, they are immaterial
yet non-transcendent, a life that at once continues to live
on but that lives on in a kind of interminable, vacuous,
immortality. Nekros is thus not the corpse but rather 'the
dead', or the existence of a life-after-life.

But what, if anything, 'lives on' after life? Paul provides
what would become a center of dispute in later theological
debates over resurrection. The mortal body, like all living
things, displays an infusion of life-spirit as well as processes
of growth. 'But God gives it a body as he has determined,
and to each kind of seed he gives its own body [...] So also
is the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is
perishable, it is raised imperishable [...] It is sown a natural
body: it is raised a spiritual body' 22 The organicist motif
of resurrection is that of a seed that is sown in the earth
and that grows and is animated (or re-animated) into a new
body, the latter being both the resurrection of the person as
well as that of the community of the corpus mysticum.

There is also a great deal of ambiguity in the Pauline
formula. Patristic thinkers differed on what kind of

21. Ibid., XI.3842.

22. I Corinthians 15.38, 42, 44, New International Version.

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life-after-life resurrection was, and how such a supernatural
form of life was to take place. 23 One set of debates centres
around the problem of the temporality of resurrection. If
the living, mortal, earthbound body was susceptible to the
processes of growth and decay, then in what material state
would the body be resurrected? What kind of life returns?
Would the resurrected body - the life-after-life - live in
a state of perpetual stasis (as a kind of 'living statue'), or
does it still undergo transformations, either in the form of
higher perfections, or in terms of a beatific hypergrowth?
The so-called material continuity debates among Patristic
thinkers not only highlights the problem of time in relation
to life and after-life, but it points to a problem that cuts
across the theological and political domains (for instance,
when Paul lays out the basic anatomy of the corpus mysticum
as constituted both by unity and by participation).

Resurrection could be resurrection of the body, the soul,
or more generally of 'the dead'. But even theories of the
resurrection of the soul - as one finds in Origen's notion
of a 'spiritual body' - still maintain the minimal necessity
of a body-in-flux. The problems of material continuity are
also linked to spatial and topological problems concerning
the material process by which the formless body of decay
and putrefaction is re-assembled and re-vitalized. The mere
return of material particles does not constitute resurrec-
tion, for those particles must be either ensouled, renewed,
or in some way cast anew. And here the almost absurdist
debates concerning 'chain consumption' come into the
foreground. If the corpse undergoes decay and decompo-
sition into so many particles and non-living matter, if the

23. The most sophisticated account of such debates remains Caroline Walker
Bynum's study The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995).

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COLLAPSE IV

corpse is devoured by worms and beasts, and those beasts
devoured by man, how can the parts or particles of the
body be re-assembled? (One can imagine a solution to this
problem offered byjarry's Ubu ... ). One partial resolution,
offered by Tertullian, was to shift emphasis from the matter
to the form of the resurrected body, so that continuity could
exist through change. Cannibalism thus does not negate
continuity, and the living dead can also be the eaten dead.

The theological debates over resurrection point to
some basic dichotomies: should the organicist model of
the growth and decay of the natural world (seeds, plants,
animals) serve as the analogical model for resurrection,
or are those processes precisely what resurrection aims to
correct and to 'heal'? Such questions have to do, in effect,
with the nature and the supernature of the after-life, or
better, with the relation between life and a 'life-plus-some-
thing' that constitutes the early Medieval theology and later
Scholastic onto-theology. Insofar as the after-life is related
in some way - as analogy, as model, as perfection - to
finite, mortal life, it obtains a certain familiarity that enables
thinkers such as Origen to talk at length about growth and
decay in a theological context. But insofar as the after-life is
a supernatural phenomenon, a divine and sovereign action,
it remains outside the scope of philosophical and even
theological inquiry.

How can life - something that is presumably lived - be
situated at such a point of inaccessibility? Discussing the
role of the supernatural in the eighteenth-century gothic
novel, literary critic S.L. Varnado suggests that the aesthetics
of the gothic novel revolve around a confrontation with
the divine as an experience of horror. Varnado uses the
theological term 'numinous' to describe this experience, the

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limit-experience of 'absolute otherness'. In gothic fictions,
the numinous is ephemeral; it can either be revealed to have
natural and rational causes (as in Radcliffe's The Mysteries of
Udolpho), or the supernatural can be affirmed, and its horror
sublimated into an affirmation of faith (Walpole's The Castle
ofOtranto) or a descent into damnation (Lewis's The Monk).

The concept of the numinous is etymologically
associative to the Kantian concept of noumena. Kant's own
re-affirmation of the split between phenomena (the world as it
appears to the subject) and noumena (the inaccessible world-
in-itself) tended to draw his analyses towards the former
and away from the latter. Indeed, there is a sense in which
Kant's antinomies of pure reason - God, the universe, the
soul - are pushed so far away from phenomena that they
begin to occupy a space not that far from noumena. 24 And yet
it is precisely this domain - the anonymous 'there is' - that
has for so long remained a point of attraction for ontology.

Let us consider a conceptual portmanteau, comprising
the gothic 'numinous' (the horror of the divine as absolute
otherness) and Kantian noumena (the unhuman, anonymous
'in itself) . In what sense is the nekros, as 'the dead', also a kind
of nouminous life? A nouminous life would have to articulate
a conceptual space that is neither that which is lived and
outside of discourse (the gothic 'numinous'), nor that which
is purely reasoned and unlived (the Kantian antinomies).
We could call this a 'horror of life' if such a phrase did

24. Kant, in the Lectures on Philosophical T'lieology, notes the following: 'God knows
all things as they are in themselves a priori and immediately through an intuitive
understanding. For he is the being of all beings and every possibility has its ground
in him. If we were to natter ourselves so much as to claim that we know the modum
noumenon, then we would have to be in community with God so as to participate
immediately in the divine ideas [...] To expect this in the present life is tire business
of mystics and theosophists [...] Fundamentally Spinozism could just as well be called
a great fanaticism as a form of atheism' (trans. Allen Wood and Gertrude Clark,
Cornell University Press, 1978, 86).

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COLLAPSE IV

not bring with it undue anthropomorphic and even exis-
tentialist connotations. Perhaps we can say that, if the life-
after-life is a nouminous life, it is because it elicits a noumenal
horror that is the horror of a life that indifferently 'lives on'.

5. The Spirit of Biology

The relationship between theology and horror in the
West invites a number of superficial comparisons: in the
Eucharist there is both cannibalism and vampirism; in the
Jewish and Christian apocalyptic traditions the realization
of the City of God always entails resurrection of the dead;
and in numerous instances the New Testament portrays
the various demons and demonic possessions that elicit
the healing powers of the Messiah. Indeed, considering
the extent to which genre horror deals with the themes of
death, resurrection, and the divine and demonic, one could
argue that genre horror is a secular, cultural expression of
theological concerns.

If we look more closely, however, we see that in many
instances it is a concept of 'life' that mediates between
theology and horror. We can even imagine our theologians
carefully watching the classics of early twentieth-century
horror film: the relation between the natural and the
supernatural (Aquinas watching The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) ;
the distinction or non-distinction between human and
beast (Augustine watching The Wolf Man or Cat People);
the coherence or incoherence of the corpus mystkum (Paul
watching Revolt of the ^pmbies or I Bury the Living) ; the
problem of the afterlife (Dante watching the Italian silent
film version of L'Inferno) . But one need not imagine such
scenarios, for many so-called art-horror films deal with
such issues, from David Cronenberg's early 'tissue horror'

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films, to Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly, to Dario
Argento's now-complete 'Three Mothers' trilogy.

If both theology and horror deal with the concept of
'life', then what exactly is this 'life' that lies at the limits
of the thinkable? Aristotle gives us one clue. In the De
anima Aristotle explicitly thinks the question of life as an
ontological question, through the concept oipsukhe: 'It must
be the case then that soul (psukhe) is substance as the form
of a natural body which potentially has life, and since this
substance is actuality, soul will be the actuality of such a
body' 25 There is, to borrow terms that Scholasticism would
favor, an 'ensoulment' or animation that thus takes place
in hylomorphism, a process through which life is literally
formed (or in-formed ... and sometimes de-formed).

However Aristotle gives us a slightly different picture in
the De Generatione et Corruptione. Here the central question is
not about any principle of life, but rather about the problem
of morphology. Aristotle asks, how are 'coming-to-be' and
'passing-away' different from alteration in general? Are
growth and decay merely examples of the larger genre of
change in itself? This in turn leads to a more fundamental
question regarding the domain of the living: What is that
which grows'?' 26

Aristotle's approach is to distinguish between different
modalities of change. There are, first, the processes of
alteration, which are qualitative (one thinks of a tree
sprouting branches or an animal growing fur - the tree
or animal remains the same kind of tree or animal).

25. Trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (New York: Penguin, 1986), II. 1.412a, 157.

26. Trans. Harold Joachim, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New
York: Modern Library, 2001), I.5.321a.30, 489.

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There are also the processes of coming-to-be and passing-
away, which are substantial changes (as when one animal
is eaten by another animal, the former undergoing modi-
fication in substance). Finally there are the processes of
growth and decay which can involve changes in magnitude
(growing larger or smaller) . 27 Now, while the first two are
general processes of change that occur in the living and
non-living, Aristotle implies that growth and decay are
exclusive to the domain of the living. Why is this? One
of the reasons Aristotle provides is that growth and decay,
though exclusive to the living, fundamentally have to
do with changes across the substance of the living and
non-living, changes that may be due to 'the accession of
something, which is called food' and is said to be 'contrary
to flesh', and that involves the 'transformation of this food
into the same form as that of flesh'. 28

To Aristotle's example of nutrition we might also include
the processes of decay and decomposition, the reverse
passage of nekros into non-living matter. Food for worms ...
But might we also include another passage, that of nekros
into the life-after-life? What sort of change would this be
- alteration, coming-to-be/passing-away or growth/decay?
Would this constitute a kind of biology of spiritual transfor-
mation, or would it constitute the 'spirit of biology'?

What horror explicitly thinks, theology implicitly
admits: a profound fissure at the heart of the concept of
'life'. Life is at once this or that particular instance of the
living, but also that which is common to each and every

27. 'We must explain (i) wherein growth differs from coming-to-be and from
alteration' and (ii) what is the process of growing and the process of diminishing in
each and all of the things that grow and diminish' (Ibid., 1. 5. 320a. 9-12, 485).

28. Ibid., I.5.321b.36-322a.l-3, 490.

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instance of the living. Let us say that the former is 'the
living', while the latter is 'Life' (capital L) . If the living are
particular manifestations of Life (or that-which-is-living) ,
then Life in itself is never simply this or that instance of
the living, but something like a principle of life (or that-by-
which-the-living-is-living) . This fissure between Life and the
living is Aristotelian in origin, but the fissure only becomes
apparent in particular instances - we see it in the Scholastic
attempt to conceptualize 'spiritual creatures', we see it in
the problem of the life-after-life of resurrection, and we also
see it in natural philosophy and the attempts to account for
teratological anomalies and aberrations.

However, the most instructive examples come from
classical horror film, in particular the 'creature features'
of film studios such as Universal or RKO. The prolifera-
tion of living contradictions in horror film constitutes our
modern bestiary. Let us consider a hagiography of life in
the relation between theology and horror. The living dead,
the undead, the demon-beast, and the phantasm. Each of
these are repudiations of life, but not their full negation. Life
is repudiated in favor of an ambivalent and 'nouminous'
after-life. Each also takes up a certain relation between
life and the political, centered around a key concept that
structures its own genre conventions. The table overleaf
provides a brief summary.

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COLLAPSE IV

LIVING DEAD

UNDEAD

DEMON-
BEAST

PHANTASM

Exemplar

The zombie

The vampire

Demonic

possession;

lycanthropy

The ghost, the
specter

Allegory

Working class,
the mob, mass

Aristocratic,
Romanticism

Bourgeois, the
therapeutic

Divine -
religious, tire
spirit, the soul

Avatars

Multitude,
contagion

Blood, rats,
bats, mist

Beast, animal,

monster,

chimera

Mediums,
portents, signs

Ontology

Flesh

Blood

Meat

Spirit

Tables such as this obviously have their limitations.
But one thing to note is that in each case we have a form
of life that at once repudiates 'life itself for some form of
after-life. Each of these figures are literally living contra-
dictions. The zombie is the animated corpse, the vampire
is the decadence of immortality the demon is at once a
supernatural being and a lowly beast, and the specter exists
through materializations of its immateriality. And, in each
case, the form of after-life works towards a concept of life
that is itself constituted by a privation or a negation, a 'life-
minus-something'; the basic Aristotelian (and Hippocratic)
concepts of flesh, blood, meat, and spirit are paradoxically
living but without life. In this sense, horror expresses the logic of
incommensurability between Life and the living.

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6. Univocal Creatures

One of the peculiarities of Aristotle's De anima is that,
while it opens with the stated aim of inquiring into the
'principle of life', it quickly bypasses this aim in favor of
detailed analyses of the natural world, the senses, and the
intellect. What ostensibly begins with an investigation into
the ontology of toe ends with a rather opaque meditation on
nous. It is almost as if Aristotle discovers that the question of
'life' can only be ontological if it ceases to be a question of
life-as-such. This has also coloured later glosses on the text,
such as those by Averroes and Aquinas, whose commen-
taries are themselves characterized by this shift. 29

In Book II, however, Aristotle makes some important
distinctions. After having offered the concept of psukhe as
the life-principle, Aristotle distinguishes between different
types of psukhe - that is, thai psukhe is itself manifested in a
range of specific forms. As is well-known, Aristotle distin-
guishes between plants, animals, and humans, based on
the manifestation of psukhe or the life-form that governs
them. While plants are characterized by a nutritive psukhe,
animals are characterized by a sensory and motile psukhe,
and humans by a reasoning or intellective psukhe. This
forms an ascending order, for whereas plants are governed
by nutrition, they can neither move nor think. The same
follows for animals, since they lack reason.

The Aristotelian distinction was, of course, surpassed
by the growth of natural history and, later, the emergence
of a separate field of biology. But while the modern life
sciences have analyzed the domain of the living down to

29. Averroes' notion of the 'material Intellect' as well as the Thomist distinction
between existence and essence, can be regarded as attempts to smooth over the
transition in the De anima between the question of 'life' and the question of thought.

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the smallest molecule, the Aristotelian concept of a 'life
principle' remains contested terrain. 30 In particular, one
issue left unresolved in the De anima has to do with the
concept of psukhe itself. Is there one, univocal psukhe that
cuts across different domains of the living? Does psukhe in
effect emanate from its ideal center towards the multitude
of individual life forms? Or is there a psukhe that is proper to
each individual, constituting a kind of propriety to psukhe?

The Scholastic reception of Aristotle offers a number
of responses, and, ironically, forms an important chapter
in the philosophy of biology. However, before Aristotle's
'biological' works make their appearance in the twelfth
century via Arabic translations, there were already attempts
to indirectly think Life as a name of the divine. The
creature, emblematic of the domain of the living, is always a
symptom. It is an effect, a product - as Bonaventure would
put it, a vestigium or 'footprint' of the divine. The world of
the living is a liber creaturae. Life is precisely that which is
symptomatic of the divine, though it is not of the divine
itself.

But it is Aquinas who both synthesizes the various
positions on the creature and emphasizes that the concept of
the creature revolves around the relation between Creator
and creature, supernatural and natural, light and mud. In
his attempts to wed Aristotelianism with Christian doctrine,
Aquinas offers a neat summary of what we might call the
'creaturely triad'. What is the relation between the creature
and Creator, between the living and the divine Life that
make the living possible? Aquinas first sets up a dichotomy

30. The differing positions of genetic determinism, biocomplexity, developmental
systems biology, and the various branches of cognitive science today raise these
questions.

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between two approaches, that of equivocity and that of
univocity. In the first, there is no relation between creature
and Creator, and the divine remains forever outside the
possibility of being thought. In the second - univocity
- there is a relation of continuity between creature and
Creation, such that, in extreme cases, the latter can be said
to be co-existent with and immanent in the former. The
problems with each, from Aquinas' position, are easy to
see. While equivocity forecloses any possibility of thinking
or experiencing the divine, univocity makes it too easy, in
effect flattening the divine onto nature. As is well-known,
the solution offered by Aquinas is that of analogy. Between
no relation (equivocity) and pure relation (univocity), there
is partial relation, or analogy. Thus the creature is analogous
to the Creator, their difference articulated in the form of
degrees of perfection ('proportion' and 'proportionality').
The creature is the life that is less-than-divine, the Creator
is the life that is more-than-the-living.

Might we also then say that, for Aquinas, the living are
analogously related to Life? Aristotle's question of 'life' and
the life-principle cannot be asked of Life as such. It can only
be asked of the living, of something 'beyond' the living or
that forms the living. But then we would have to consider
'life' in general as a kind of negative concept, a concept that
at once asserts its asking as it recedes into the background
of this question.

This negative concept of life is ontologized along two
axes. The first is predicated on ontological difference. It
posits a distinction, as we noted previously, between 'Life'
and 'the living'. The De anima posits psukhe as a general
life-principle, but at the same time distinguishes it from
particular instances of the living in plant, animal, and human

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life. Everything hinges on the relation between Life and the
living. In the period of high Scholasticism, the spectrum of
creation, from monotheism to pantheism, from orthodoxy
to heresy, illustrates the way in which the question of Life
is never far from the question of the nature of the divine. In
this sense the De anima is ontologically prior to texts such as
De Partibus Animalium and Historia Animalium.

The non-concept of life is also aligned on a second
axis, on which it is predicated on a distinction between
a 'principle of life' and its corresponding 'boundaries of
articulation' (this is its essence and existence, substance
and accident) . The principle of life may vary quite widely,
from psukhe to a theological soul, to modern mechanism
and/or 'vital spirit', to contemporary concepts of molecule,
gene, and information. But it always makes possible one or
more boundary relations that, when applied to the domain
of the living, re-affirm the principle of life as essence. Such
boundaries include, first and foremost, that between the
living and the non-living. Secondary ones include the
division between the organic and inorganic, and between
human and animal.

7. Pathological Immanence

Arguably, the modern concept that has done the most
to steer the question of life away from ontology has been
that of the organism. Only when the relation between Life
and the living can be encapsulated in the architecture of the
organism, can the question of life emerge from its Scholastic
hiding place into an epistemologically-rooted 'life science'.

But even in the life sciences there are innumerable
instances of life-beyond-life, instances of 'the living' that
turn back upon the hidden ontological question of Life.

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For example, the emergence of a science of pathology -
what Foucault, discussing pathological anatomy in the early
nineteenth century, describes as the study of 'pathological
life' - already points to the complicated way in which the
question of whatXSs. is quickly folds onto the notion thatY&t
is. Foucault identifies several aspects to pathology - is it the
study of the disease-in-itself, the disease as it is manifested
in the patient, or the disease within a set of environmental
conditions? Pathological anatomy signals an innovation
because it not only posits that decay and decomposition
are themselves processes of life, but that they exhibit char-
acteristics that make them more than simply the inverse of
growth, development, or the healthy state.

With the emergence of modern germ theory (Koch,
Pasteur), the concept of immunity (Metchnikoff), and an
epidemiology driven by political economy (Snow's cholera
maps of London), the question becomes even more dense:
not only are there distinct processes of after-life (decay,
decomposition, putrefaction) , but these are abetted by a host
of life-forms that themselves resist easy classification within
biology. 31 The concept of pathology is an after-life, in so far
as it asks us to think Aristotle's distinction between growth
and decay, coming-to-be and passing-away in a single
thought. Today, the study of pathology is often divided along
sub-disciplinary lines that betray interesting assumptions:
while virologists bracket the roles of environment and
transmission, focusing on the pathogenic organism, epide-
miologists black-box the pathogenic organism, emphasizing
environment and a statistical approach that is biopolitically
tied to public health.

31. For example, in modern debates over whether viruses are living. For a perceptive
overview, see Lynn Margulis' book Symbiotic Planet {New York: Basic Books, 1998).

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This last dichotomy is instructive, for it suggests to us
several forms of after-life. As an organism, as a member
of 'the living', the pathogenic organism (viruses, bacteria,
fungi) can be situated broadly within the post-Darwinian
liber creaturae. But, as we know, it is the very nature of such
organisms to pass between life forms - to pass through,
to pass between, and even, in cases of genetic mutation,
to pass beyond. The means by which this is achieved are
through processes that innately question the autonomy of
the living organism - infection, transfection, parasitism,
symbiosis. This in turn opens onto another, quite different
form of after-life, one where the locality of 'the living'
tends to become unlocalized, diffuse, distributed, and even
invisible, tending towards an abstract domain in which 'the
living' comes to overlap with 'Life'.

This is precisely the terrain explored by Deleuze, and
the point of reference here is the Scholastic concept of
the creature. A setting of the maturely life within an ontology of
immanence- perhaps this is the tension at the heart of Deleuze's
own, peculiar form of vitalism. Deleuze's emphasis on the
nonorganic life that altogether bypasses biological categori-
sation is often coupled with an equal emphasis on that
which is alive, and not simply on that which exists. Though
Deleuze, in his own writings and with Guattari, does make
frequent references to the history of biology (e.g. the Cuvi-
er-Geoffroy debate, Jacob and genetics, animal ethology),
it is really in the context of Scholasticism that this type of
Deleuzian biophilosophy can be identified.

In his lectures at Vincennes, Deleuze will often re-cast the
Scholastic triad of analogy-equivocity-univocity in terms of
another triad, that of transcendence-emanence-immanence.
While Deleuze's admiration for Spinoza is well-known, it is

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Duns Scotus who plays a pivotal role in the passage between
the Neoplatonic emphasis on emanation and 'participation',
and Spinoza's assertion of immanence, encapsulated in his
famous phrase Deus sive natura ('God or nature'). 32 The very
problem of creation, and of the relation between Creator
and creature, must presuppose a relation of continuity, even
though a 'formal objective distinction' can still be made
between the two: 'In the concept of a creature, however,
no notion or species will be found to represent something
proper to God which is wholly different in nature from
anything pertaining to a creature.' 33 For Duns Scotus (in
the 'strong' reading via Deleuze), nothing can be thought
through the creature which is not univocally thought of the
divine; the natural always implicates within itself the super-
natural, life the after-life.

For Deleuze, the central ontological issue is thus
not that of transcendence vs immanence, but rather of a
different tension: that between enianence and immanence.
The former produces immanent effects, but such effects
emanate from a source that remains above and beyond
those effects; emanence of effects implies an eminence of
cause. Not surprisingly, Deleuze favors immanence, in
which the effect is immanent in the cause. Deleuze expands
the term 'expression', borrowed from Spinoza, to describe
this creaturely immanence, essentially flattening out the

32. Scotus, in the Opus oxoniense, notes that 'a species which can be multiplied in
more than one individual, is not of itself determined to any certain number of
individuals but is compatible with an infinity of individuals. This is evident in the
case of all perishable species. Therefore, if the perfection of necessary existence
can be multiplied in more than one individual, it is not of itself restricted to any
certain number, but is compatible with infinity (trans. Allen Wolter, in Dints Scotus:
Philosophical Writings, Hackett, 1987, I., dist.II, q.iii, 88).

33. Ibid., I, dist. Ill, q.i, 29.

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COLLAPSE IV

'divisions of nature' first formalized by Eriugena into a
single, univocal, immanent expression: 'In the limit Nature
as a whole is a single Animal in which only the relations
between the parts vary.' 34

If this notion of expressive immanence is, as Badiou
notes, a 'vitalist ontology', is it vitalist because of what it
says about 'Life' or for what it says about 'the living'? What,
indeed, does vitalism come to mean in Deleuze's biophi-
losophy if not a kind of subtractive vitalism, one that posits
a creature-without-creation, an emanation-without-center,
a decay that is growth, and a collapsing of 'Life' and 'the
livins;', a distinction that structures both the Aristotelian
and Scholastic concepts of life? If pathology broadly names
one kind of life-after-life (growth-in-decay, coming-to-be in
passing- away) , a pathological immanence would name one
of the central - unresolved - problematics of Deleuzian
vitalism: that of the relation between 'life' and 'immanence'.
If the former presumes some level of dynamic change
(even if that change occurs immanently), the latter requires
the existence of a fully actual, non-dynamic diffusion,
enmeshing, or blanketing. The limit-point, the pathological
turn, is at that point where immanence becomes so absolute
that is becomes ambient and pervasive, itself receding into
a zone of non-life.

8. Life as Non-Being

What is striking about many of the attempts to ontologize
life is the way in which 'life' becomes an always-receding
horizon. If we accept the Aristotelian distinction between
Life and the living as structuring the philosophy of life in

34. Gilles Deleuzc, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New
York: Zone, 1990), 278.

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the West, then it would seem that Life is always receding
behind the living. This is the limit of natural philosophy,
beyond which one must have recourse to either natural
theology or what Kant calls onto-theology the system of
knowledge of the 'being-of-all-beings'.

But, in the tradition of Aristotelian natural philosophy,
Life is not simply the absent center to every instance of the
living. The relation between Life and the living is that, while
the former conceptually guarantees the latter, in itself it is
never available to thought. This, however, does not mean
that Life is a concept of negation because it is privative, for
its lack of 'thisness' is precisely what exceeds any particular
instance of the living. If Life has a negative value, then,
it is because of its superlative nature, because it exceeds
any instance of the living. Any critique of life would have
to begin from this presupposition of the superlative nature
of Life. Life is 'nothing' precisely because it is never some
thing.

In this sense, philosophical thinking about life borrows
heavily from the tradition of mystical theology - and in
particular from the tradition of negative theology. Before
Anselm offers his famous ontological proof for the existence
of God (God as 'that beyond which nothing greater can be
thought'), the ninth-century Irish philosopher John Scottus
Eriugena provides one of the most elaborate theories of the
divine as 'nothing' {nihil). Eriugena's Periphyseon is deeply
influenced by the apophatic approach of the Pseudo-Diony-
sius. But the Periphyseon applies a dialectical rigor not found
in the latter's works. In Book III, Eriugena puts forth a
notion of the 'divine darkness', in which the divine is nihil
precisely because of its superlative nature: 'For everything
that is understood and sensed is nothing else but the

85

COLLAPSE IV

apparition of what is not apparent, the manifestation of the
hidden, the affirmation of the negated, the comprehension
of the incomprehensible [...]' 35

To what extent can we say that Life is nihil in this sense?
Once the ontological difference between 'Life' and 'the
living' is collapsed, life subtracts from itself any possibility
of an affirmation. What remains is a kind of negative
theology, or better, a negative theo-zoology whereby
life always displays some relation to the negation of life.
Hence the after-life is not about the dichotomy between life
and death, but about a more fundamental relation - that
between Life and Being.

One problem has to do with what happens once the
concept of 'Life' detaches itself from 'the living'. This
is a problem implicit in the De anima, where the concept
of psukhe is sometimes a life-principle, and sometimes a
stand-in for the being of form itself. In a modern context,
process philosophy (Bergson, Whitehead) and process
theology (Chardin, Steiner) likewise reach a zone in which
'Life' becomes convertible with Being - even if the name of
Life is process or becoming.

For many, however, all of this is a false problem. The
opening sections of Beingand 2iw<?provide what is perhaps the
clearest statement on this point. There Heidegger effectively
glosses over the fields of anthropology, psychology, and
biology as fields which must presume being in order to
begin their inquiries about man, mind, and organism.
While each of these fields, according to Heidegger, deals in
some way with Life, none of them are capable of posing the

35. Book III, 633A, from Iohannis Scotti Erivgenae, Periphyseon {De Diuisione Naturae),
Liber Teriius, ed. and trans. LP. Sheldon-Williams with the collaboration of Ludwig
Bieler (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1981).

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Thacker - Nine Disputations

question of Life as an ontological question:

[. . .] in any serious and scientifically minded 'philosophy of life'
(this expression says about as much as the 'botany of plants')
there lies an inexplicit tendency toward understanding the being
of Da-sein. What strikes us first of all in such a philosophy (and
this is its fundamental lack) is that 'life' itself as a kind of being
does not become a problem ontologically. 36

This 'missing ontological foundation' is itself what
grounds these fields. The question that Life is, is displaced
by the question of what Life is - or, more accurately, what
the domain of the living is. The anthropological category
of man, the psychological category of mind, and a general
biology of the organism all presume a Being of Life. Where
Heidegger leaves off, however, is at the question of whether
Life is a species of Being, or whether the ontology of Life in
effect transforms Life into Being. His last words on the topic
are at once suggestive and opaque: 'Life has its own kind of
being, but it is essentially accessible only in Da-sein.' 37

One point of entiy is to think about non-Life (a non-Life
that is not Death) , and by extension, non-Being (a non-Being
that is not Nothing). Put another way, the challenge would
be to think the relation between Life and Being as mediated
by negation. This is, to be sure, an ancient problem, one
posed by the presocratics, in the attempt to secure a concep-
tually-sound concept of the One or the Many. At its root is
the problem - really, the profound ambivalence towards -
the concept of non-Being. As Levinas notes, in a language
not too far removed from Eriugena:

36. Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh {Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1996), §10, 4344.

37. Ibid., 46.

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COLLAPSE IV

When the forms of things are dissolved in the night, the
darkness of the night, which is neither an object nor the quality
of an object, invades like a presence [...] But this nothing is
not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that;
there is not 'something'. But this universal absence is in turn a
presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence [...] There is is an
impersonal form, like in it rains, or it is warm. 38

Thus the problem of non-Being is not simply that of
a fear of nothingness or of the vacuum. Rather, it is the
quite gothic fear of a something whose thingness is under
question. 'This impersonal, anonymous, yet indistinguish-
able consummation' of being, which murmurs in the depths
of nothingness itself we shall designate by the term there is
[...] The rustling of the there is [...] is horror.' 39 The pinnacle
of this type of horror - really a kind of concept-horror - is
the evisceration of all noological interiority: 'horror turns
the subjectivity of the subject, his particularity qua entity,
inside out.' 40

What is the 'there is' of Life? Is the concept of Life
already a 'there is', and therefore already enveloped in
the gothic horror of absolute otherness and pervasive
anonymity? If 'Life', as opposed to 'the living', is always
receding into the anonymous 'there is', does this then mean
that Life is really Life-without-Being?

38. 'There is: Existence without Existents', in Tlic Leviiias Reader, trans. Sean Hand
(London: Blackwell, 1990), 30.

39. Ibid, 30; 32.

40. Ibid., 33.

Thacker - Nine Disputations

9. Anonymous Horror

Granted, there is a certain absurdity in asking about
the non-being of Life; one might as well inquire into non-
existent creatures ... which is, of course, precisely what the
domain of supernatural horror does. Horror film is replete
with examples of the horror of the 'there is ... ' The titles
of such films are telling: The Being, The Creature, The Entity,
It's Alive!, It Lives Again, Monster Zero, The Stuff, Them!, The
Thing, and so on. In these films, the site of horror is not
simply that of a physically threatening monster, for at least
these can be given names (Dracula, Frankenstein's monster,
Wolf-Man), and thereby included within the sphere of
moral and theological law. This also means they can be
destroyed. But what of the creature that cannot be named,
or that is named in its unnamability? The unnamable
creature is also the unthinkable creature. This would be
the B-horror version of Beckett's L'innomable. In some cases
the unnamable creature is without form, the intrusion of
a raging, inverted hylomorphism. Cold War films such as
The Blob and Caltiki the Immortal Monster exist in a state of
oozing, abject, borderlessness. In other cases the unnamable
creature is without matter, existing as pure (demonic) spirit,
an inverted theophany. In Fiend Without A Face, human
beings are besieged by immaterial, brainstem-like entities,
suggesting telepathy as a form of contagion. 41

These films represent a subtle subversion of the classic
creature-feature by shifting the criteria by which a monster
is made. Whereas the creature-feature films define the
monster as an aberration (and abomination) of nature,
the unnamable creature is an aberration of thought.

41. In postmodernity this tradition is extended in films such as Mario Bava's Plaiwt of
tile Vampires. Cronenberg's Scanners and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure.

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COLLAPSE IV

The classical creature-features still retain an element of
familiarity, despite the impure mixture of categories (plant
+ human) or differences in scale (giant reptiles, ants,
leeches, etc.). Films featuring unnamable creatures, by
contrast, contextualize the monster in terms of ontology
(form-without-matter, matter-without-form) or in terms of
onto-theology (the spiritual abject, the oozing abstraction) .
They point towards a form of life-after-life that highlights
conceptual aberrations.

Let us pause for a moment and gather together our
propositions concerning this concept-horror, or, granting
ourselves some poetic license, what we can also refer to as
the 'teratological noosphere':

• The question of an ontology of life is traditionally
predicated on a fundamental distinction between
Life and the living, or, between that-by- which- the-
living-is-living and that-which-is-living.

• This distinction is deployed along two axes: One
which requires a 'principle-of-life' to structure all
manifestations of the living, and another in which
the living is in turn structured according to various
'boundaries of articulation'.

• In the context of Scholasticism, the ontology of life
continually oscillates between a natural philosophy
of creatures and an onto-theology of the divine
nature.

• The structure of the concept of life is most often
that of negative theology.

Each of these propositions structures the basic way in
which 'life' as a concept is thought as such. Each of these also
contain one or more fissures, one or more 'heretical' strands

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Thacker - Nine Disputations

of thinking. To this we can offer another proposition:

• In its traditional onto-theological formulations,
Life is what is denied of Being. While the latter
is the domain of the transcendent, the eternal,
the infinite, the spiritual, and the fully actual, the
former is subtracted from this - the immanent,
the temporal, the finite, the material, and the
virtual.

Life therefore bears some minimal relation to non-Being.
But this can take several forms. The non-Being of Life can
be situated either 'above' or 'below' the scale of the human
- on the one hand there is the strata of Thomist 'spiritual
creatures' or the strata of Aristotelian creaturely life, while
on the other hand there is the strata of demonic multitudes
or the strata of subhuman plague and pestilence. This non-
anthropomorphic and even misanthropic quality of Life
sustains these strata with a certain inaccessibility. Even
as Life, in conditioning the living, is able to assert its self-
evident character, it also puts forth its noumenal qualities.
Kant's statements concerning the teleology of the natural
world would have to be qualified: it is because Life is noumenal
that it is tekological. But this then means that the 'ends' of Life
are also 'anonymous'.

Any questionof the possibility of an ontology of life would
have to consider 'life' as a particular intersection between a
biology of a non-conceptual life itself and an onto-theology
of transcendence, emanence, and immanence. The problem
is that the concept of Life has remained tenaciously non-
conceptual, even as it continues to function in a conceptual,
even ontological way in contemporary scientific fields
such as network science, swarm intelligence, and biocom-
plexity The issue is not that Life cannot think its own

91

COLLAPSE IV

foundationalism, its own decision. Indeed, this is arguably
what post-Darwinian biology obsesses over. Rather, the
issue is that Life as a concept must always presume a further
question concerning Being. The infamous question 'What
is Life?' appears to be always superseded by the question
of 'What is Being?' And yet the very idea of Life-without-
Being would seem to be an absurdity for philosophy -
though, as we've seen, not for horror.

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COLLAPSE IV

Czech Forest

Rafani

Cutouts - illustrations, 170 x 50 cm (2002).

93

Nase dobra vule skoncila
v roce 1938

'Our goodwill ended in 1938.'

Jen s pocitem naplnovane
spravedlnosti

'Only with a feeling of fulfilled justice.'

Je to skutecne novostavba
na pude panenske

'It is truly new building on virgin soil.'

i« ■IbHij

»*T r.

'fjj /m.

1ZmJ*k 1 ifil i

ji

Heim ins Reich

Vuci nemcum pocit'uji Cesi
hlubokou horkost

'Czechs feel deep bitterness towards Germans.'

Nemec zustal nasim
nesmifitelnym nepntelem

'The German remains our irreconcilable enemy'

I nemecke zeny a hitlerovska

mladez nesou vinu

na zlocinech nemcu

'Even German women and Hitler youth carry the guilt
of German Crimes.'

'There is enough space in the graveyard.'

'Never stop hating Germans.'

Just, but uncompromising.'

'Treat the German like the victor you are'

COLLAPSE IV

M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire

Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?

China Mieville

0. Prologue: the Tentacular Novum

Taking for granted, as we do, its ubiquitous cultural
debris, it is easy to forget just how radical the Weird was
at the time of its convulsive birth. 1 Its break with previous
fantastics is vividly clear in its teratology, which renounces
all folkloric or traditional antecedents. The monsters of high
Weird are indescribable and formless as well as being and/or
although they are and/or in so far as they are described with an
excess of specificity, an accursed share of impossible somatic
precision; and their constituent bodyparts are dispropor-
tionately insectile/cephalopodic, without mythic resonance.
The spread of the tentacle - a limb-type with no Gothic
or traditional precedents (in Western' aesthetics) - from
a situation of near total absence in Euro-American tera-
toculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the
default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal
shift to a Weird culture. 2

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COLLAPSE IV

The 'Lovecraft Event', as Ben Noys invaluably
understands it, 3 is unquestionably the centre of gravity of
this revolutionary moment; its defining text, Lovecraft's
'The Call of Cthulhu', published in 1928 in Weird Tales.
However, Lovecraft's is certainly not the only haute Weird.
A good case can be made, for example, that William
Hope Hodgson, though considerably less influential
than Lovecraft, is as, or even more, remarkable a Weird
visionary; and that 1928 can be considered the Weird
tentacle's coming of age, Cthulhu ('monster [...] with an
octopus-like head') a twenty-first birthday iteration of the
giant 'devil-fish' - octopus - first born to our sight squatting
malevolently on a wreck in Hodgson's The Boats of the 'Glen
Carrig', in 1907. 4

There are, of course, honoured precursors: French
writers were early and acute sufferers from Montfort's
Syndrome, an obsessive fascination with the cephalopodic. s
In short order, the two key figures in the French pre-Weird
tentacular, Jules Verne and Victor Hugo, produced works -

1. ST. Joshi's periodisation of the golden age of Weird as 1880-1940 is persuasive
{S.T.Joshi, Tlie Weird Tale, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

2. I have argued this elsewhere: 'Introduction' to H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains
of Madiwss (NY: Random House, 2005); presentation at the 'Weird Realism:
Lovecraft and Theory 1 event, London, Goldsmiths, 26 April 2007; 'Weird Fiction'
in Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint feds.), Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (London:
Routledge, 2008 [forthcoming]).

3. In his contribution to the 'Weird Realism' event in 2007 (see previous note).

4. William Hope Hodgson, 77k j House on the Borderland, and Ot/ier Novels (London:
Gollancz, 2002), 28-29.

5. Named by RezaNegarestani for Pierre Denys deMontfort (1766-1820), pioneering
and dissident French malacologist, author of, among others, the multi-volume Histoire
Katurelle Generate et Partiadiere des Molhtsques (6 volumes [1-4 only by de Montfort]
Paris: F. Dufart, 1801-5), which took seriously tire existence of tire 'kraken octopus'
and 'colossal octopus', and included still-iconic illustrations.

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Mieville - Quantum Vampire

Verne in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869) and Hugo in
The Toilers of the Sea (1866) - which include extraordinary
descriptions of monster cephalopods. These texts, while
indispensable to the development of the Weird, remain
in important respects pre-Weird not only temporally but
thematically representing contrasting oppositions to the still-
unborn tradition, to varying degrees prefigurations of the
Weird and attempts pre-emptively to de-Weird it.

Verne reveals his giant squid 6 at the end of a character's
careful itemisation of its qualities, qualities which he can
see, but which we for several paragraphs suppose him to
be remembering from descriptions ('Did it not measure
about six metres? [...] was its head not crowned with eight
tentacles...? [...] were its eyes not extremely prominent
[...] ?'). 7 The animal thus appears pre-mediated by human
understanding, at the end of a long section detailing the
history of architeuthology so that its monstrousness,
though certainly not denied, is already defined by human
categorisation. Frisson notwithstanding, the Weird, usually
implacably Real in Lacanian terms, is preincorporated into
the symbolic system.

When he sees it, the narrator Arronax relays the
sight with a laborious itemised description interrupted by
pedantic asides ('Its eight arms, or rather legs, were [...]
implanted on its head, thus giving these animals the name

6. In fact the animal is, fittingly, slightly evasive of precise taxonomy: it is described
as a 'poulpe\ usually translated 'octopus', and as 'calmar\ 'squid'. Though it seems to
resemble the latter more than the former, with eight limbs it is lacking the squid's
two longer hunting arms. It has also been translated into English as an 'immense
cuttlefish' 'devil-fish', and indeed as a 'poulp'.

7. All quotations from Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, translated by William
Butcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, revised 2001. Available at: <http://
home.netvigator.com/ ~wbutcher/books/20t.htm>).

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COLLAPSE IV

of cephalopods') and questionable exactitude that can only
undermine the 'cosmic awe' 8 which typifies the Weird
('We could distinctly see the 250 suckers in the form of
hemispherical capsules [...]'). Arronax carefully uses 'bras'
then 'pieds' to describe the limbs, rather than his assistant's
'tentacules': scientism rejects the tentacle. 'I did not want to
waste the opportunity of closely studying such a specimen
of cephalopod', Arronax tells us. 'I overcame the horror its
appearance caused me, picked up a pencil, and began to
draw it.' 9 Verne mounts a pre-emptive rearguard defence of
a bourgeois 'scientific rationality', depicting it as stronger
than this new bad-numinous.

Arronax describes his own description as 'too pallid',
and says that only 'the author of The Toilers of the Sea'
could do it justice. The reference is to the extraordinary
passage in which Hugo's Gilliat is attacked by a 'pieuvre'
(Guernesiais for octopus), the greatest and strangest of the
pre-Weird reveries on the tentacular, and favourite for the
title tout court. The chapter is a visionary rumination on
the horror of octopus-ness. The creature is described in a
vomit of aghast and contradictory metaphors and similes:
'a rag of cloth', 'a rolled-up umbrella', 'disease shaped into
a monstrosity', 'a wheel', 'a sleeve containing a closed fist',
'birdlime imbued with hate', 'a pneumatic machine' - and
on and on. 10

Though Hugo is far less cited than Verne as an influence
on the fantastic genre-cluster with which Lovecraft is also

8. What Lovecraft calls 'Cosmic alienage or "outsideness"' (H.P. Lovecraft, Notes on
Writing Weird Fiction, 1937. Among many other locations, see: <http://www.geocities.
com/soho/cafe/1131/14notesen.htm>).

9. Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea [emphasis added],

10. Victor Hugo, Tli£ Toilers of t/ie Sea, translated by James Hogarth {New York:
Random House, 2002), 350-352.

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Mieville - Quantum Vampire

associated, his passage is much closer to haute Weird. Hugo
counterposes the octopus to the chimera, to underline the
former's afolkloric monstrousness. He repeatedly stresses
the octopus's taxonomic transgression: it has no claws, but
deploys vacuum as a weapon; it eats and shits with the same
orifice (supposedly); it swims and walks and crawls; it is -
as he stresses with ecstatic Kristevan disgust at the octopus-
as-abject - flaccid, gangrene-like, and, 'horrifyingly [...] soft
and yielding'. 11 The octopus is problematised ontology.

Hugo is nowhere more Weird than in his admirably
clear insistence that octopuses, 'killjoys of the contemplator',
demand a rethinking of philosophy. 12 There are, nonetheless,
what one might archly call 'countervailing tendencies'
pulling the passage away from haute Weird (it should go
without saying that this is genealogy not criticism).

Though distinguished from the chimera, the octopus is
identified with the Medusa, demon, and, repeatedly, with
the vampire, reacquainting it, if unstably, with 'traditional'
teratology. The octopus is obsessively depicted as evil -
indeed, such a 'perfection of evil' that its existence is a
vector of heresies of a double god, a cosmic parity of good
and evil. 13 Although, in a more subterreanean moment of
French cephalopodia, Lautreamont deploys the octopoid
to mock moralism, as when 'legions of winged squid 14
[...] scud swiftly toward the cities of the humans, their
mission to warn men to change their ways', a similar
problematic is evident in Maldoror (1869). Lautreamont's

11. Ibid., 351.

12. Ibid., 354.

13. Ibid., 355.

14. 'poidpes' - octopuses, properly.

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COLLAPSE IV

God is confronted by Maldoror 'changed into an octopus,
clamp[ing] eight monstrous tentacles about his body', the
two now knowing they 'cannot vanquish each other'. lb
This Manichean tentacular is in sharp contrast with the
monstrosities of haute Weird, which are impossible to
translate into such terms - predatory and cosmically
amoral, but not 'evil'. If they serve any morally heuristic
purpose it is precisely to undermine any religiose good/evil
binary.

Counterintuitively it is also precisely Hugo's heady
itemisation of the octopus's dreadfulness that pulls against
its Weirdness. Hugo decries the devilfish as unthinkable
with what is almost a sermon, that unfolds aghast, yes, but
without surprise. Hugo's octopus lurks like a bad conscience,
a horror that we already know we are inadequate to thinking.
By contrast, whether one deems it successful, risible,
both, or something else, Lovecraft's hysterical insistences
that nothing like this had ever been seen before, that nothing could
possibly prepare anyone for such a sight, when his Great Old
Ones appear, is the narrative actualisation of the Weird-as-
novum, unprecedented, Event.

In 1896, the other great early adopter of the tentacular,
H.G. Wells, published the first and neglected haute Weird
text (despite its author not generally being located in the
sub-genre, perhaps because of the never-convincing Fabian
camouflage draped over his bleak numinous). 'The Sea
Raiders' tells of Haploteuthis ferox, a hitherto-unknown and
aggressively predatory cephalopod which besieges the
English coast, rising from deep waters to feed on boaters,
and disappearing again. 16

15. The Comte de Lautreamont, Maldoror & The Complete Works, translated by Alexis
Lykiard (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1994), 101, 103.

16. <http://en. wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sea_Raiders>

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Mieville - Quantum Vampire

There is no Vernian rejection of 'tentacle': the word and
its derivations appearing twenty times in the short piece.
There is no moralism - though horrifying, the monsters
are predators, not devils. Above all, 'this extraordinary
raid from the deeper sea' is unprecedented, unexpected,
unexplained, unexplainable - it simply is. All that we who
suffer this tentacular Event can hope is that they have
returned 'to the sunless depths of the middle seas, out of
which they have so strangely and so mysteriously arisen.'

The three decades between the Verne/Hugo/
Lautreamont moment and Wells's saw the Franco-Prussian
War and the Commune, the so-called 'Long Depression'
of 1873-1896, the rise of 'new unionism', and the 'new
imperialism' and murderous 'scramble for Africa'. 17 In-
creasingly visible, especially in the last, the crisis tendencies
of capitalism would ultimately lead to World War I (to
the representation of which traditional bogeys were quite
inadequate) . It is the growing proximity of this total crisis -
kata-culmination of modernity, ultimate rebuke to nostrums
of bourgeois progress - that is expressed in the shift to the
morally opaque tentacular and proto-Lovecraftian radical
Weird of The Sea Raiders'.

Like Wells and unlike Lovecraft, William Hope
Hodgson was barometric enough to the incipient apocalypse
to en-monster it before it exploded into the war that killed
him. In a stunning letter describing the front, he refers to
what he considered his masterpiece, "the Night Land: 'My
God, what a Desolation! [...] the Infernal Storm that seeps
for ever, night and day, day and night, across that most

17. Simultaneous with the increase of its formlessness and historylessness, its
efficacy as placeholder for the unrepresentable, the octopus's somatic specificity - its
spreading tentacles - also saw it increasingly deployed in satire as symbol for the
'new imperialism'.

Ill

COLLAPSE IV

atrocious Plain of Destruction. My God! Talk about a lost
World - talk about the END of the World; talk about the
"NightLand" - it is all here, not more than two hundred
odd miles from where you sit infinitely remote.' 18 The Weird
is here explicitly in John Clute's magnificent formulation,
'pre-aftermath fiction'. 19

The Weird's unprecedented forms, and its insistence
on a chaotic, amoral, anthropoperipheral universe, stresses
the implacable alterity of its aesthetic and concerns. The
Weird is irreducible. A Weird tentacle does not 'mean' the
Phallus; 20 inevitably we will mean with it, of course, but
fundamentally zYdoes not 'mean' at all (perhaps Weird Pulp
Modernism is the most Blanchotian of literature) .

1. Deathmatch

The Weird, then, is starkly opposed to the hauntologi-
cal. Hauntology, a category positing, presuming, implying
a 'time out of joint', 21 a present stained with traces of the
ghostly, the dead-but-unquiet, estranges reality in an almost
precisely opposite fashion to the Weird: with a radicalised
uncanny - 'something which is secretly familiar, which
has undergone repression and then returned from it' 22 -

18. William Hope Hodgson, Tim Wandering Soul {Hornsea: Ps Publishing/Tartarus
Press, 2005), 384.

19. Personal communication.

20. Which is why, despite the seeming isomorphism of interests and recent inevitable
cross-fertilisation, haute Weird is radically opposed to the sub-genre of pornographic
'hentai' manga and anime known as 'tentacle rape'.

21. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994): et, subsequently,
very many al.

22. Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny' (1919). <http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/
uncanny.htmf>.

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Mieville - Quantum Vampire

rather than a hallucinatory/nihilist novum. The Great Old
Ones (Outer Monstrosities, in Hodgson's formulation) 23
neither haunt nor linger. The Weird is not the return of any
repressed: though always described as ancient, and half-
recalled by characters from spurious texts, this recruitment
to invented cultural memory does not avail Weird monsters
of Gothic's strategy of revenance, but back-projects their
radical unremembered alterity into history, to en-Weird
ontology itself.

Weird writers were explicit about their anti-Gothic
sensibility: Blackwood's camper in 'The Willows'
experiences 'no ordinary ghostly fear'; Lovecraft stresses
that the 'true weird tale' is characterised by 'unexplainable
dread of outer, unknown forces' rather than by 'bloody
bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to
rule'. 24 The Weird entities have waited in their catacombs,
sunken cities and outer circles of space since aeons before
humanity. If they remain it is from a pre-ancestral time. In
its very unprecedentedness, paradoxically, Cthulhu is less
a ghost than the arche-fossil-as-predator. The Weird is if
anything ab-, not un-, canny.

This must be insisted upon for the heuristic edges of
the Weird and the hauntological - and indeed of other
fantastic categories - to stay sharp. Hence the importance of
'Geek Critique', which rebukes, say, Terry Eagleton when
he blithely discusses the 'rash of books about vampires,
werewolves, zombies and assorted mutants, as though a

23. William Hope Hodgson, 'The Hog' (1947) <http://www.forgottenfutures.com/
game/ff4/ho g.htm>.

24. Algernon Blackwood, 'The Willows' (1907). <http://www.Gutenberg.org/
files/1 1438/1 1438.txt>; H.P. Lovecraft, 'Supernatural Horror in Literature' (1927).
<http://www. yankeeclassic.com/miskatonicAibrary/stacksAiteratureAovecraft/essays/
supernat/supernOO .htm>.

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COLLAPSE IV

whole culture had fallen in love with the undead'; 25 because
whatever the merits of the rest of his argument, only two of
those figures are undead, and they are all different. Teratological
specificity demands attention. And, granting the contro-
versial position that ghosts are teratological subjects, such
specificities are nowhere more different and important than
between Weird and hauntological.

Eagleton's sort of cavalier hand-waving is increasingly
rare, at least when it comes to the ghostly. Compare Eagleton
with Sasha Handley who points out that 'to distinguish the
particular meanings attached to ghosts' demands taxonomy,
and that her object of study is not 'anonymous angelic or
evil spirits' but 'spirit[s] appearing after death'. 26 Some years
previously, however, two such perspicacious writers as Julia
Briggs and Jack Sullivan as a matter of policy play fast and
loose with categories of ghosthood. 'I am [...] compromis-
ing', Sullivan says. All of these stories are apparitional, in
one sense or another, and "ghost story" is as good a term as
any' 27 According to Briggs, 'the term "ghost story" [...] can
denote not only stories about ghosts, but [...] spirits other
than those of the dead [...] To distinguish these from one
another according to the exact shape adopted by the spirit
would be an unrewarding exercise.' 28 1 have argued, rather,

25. Terry Eagleton, 'MarkNeocleous: File Monstrous and tlu: Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism]
Radical Pkilosophy,137, May/June 2006: 45-47, at 45.

26. Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth
Century England (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), 8.

27. Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Faun to Blackwood
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978), 9. While praising the book in her invaluable
bibliography on the supernatural, Jessica Amanda Salmonson takes Sullivan to task
for the 'obscene impression that there were no women writers of ghost stories in
England'. <littp://www. violetbooks.com/bib-research.html>

28. Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: Flu: Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber
1977), 12.

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that the 'exact shape' is of enormous importance.

Briggs and Sullivan are wrong, but their error is not
merely personal. While we may sympathise with S.T. Joshi
in finding this use of the term 'ghost story' 'irksome', his
deployment of a robust common sense against it - 'To me
"ghost story" can mean nothing but a story with a ghost in
it' 29 - does not get at the nature of the problem. Key here
is Briggs's justification of her imprecision by claiming that
the term 'ghost story' 'is being employed with something
of the latitude that characterizes its general usage'. 30 The
imprecision is that of the culture, and it shifts.

A quarter-century before Briggs, 'reasons of simplicity'
were sufficient for Penzoldt to 'use the term "ghost story" also
for tales of the supernatural that do not deal with a ghost'. 31
Mindful that there is nothing simple about such a decision,
Briggs by contrast feels the need to justify her own position
at some length: the looseness of usage is changing. A quar-
ter-century after her, the new common sense has become
that ghostly ghost stories are 'a distinct literary form', 32 and
when Handley asserts her own position, precisely contrary
to Briggs's, almost as read but not quite, she takes a moment
to argue it. Clearly the politics of ghostly specificity has
shifted markedly, but has not banished all remnants of its
countertendency - hauntology is haunted by a pre-haunto-
logical taxonomic indeterminacy.

29. Joshi, Weird Fale, 2.

30. Briggs, Night Visitors, 12.

31. Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction (London: Peter Nevill, 1952), 12 n.12.

32. Srdjan Smajic, 'The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in
the Victorian Ghost Story', ELH, 70:4, Winter 2003, 1107-1136, at 1131.

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COLLAPSE IV

At this point in history, describing as a 'ghost story' a
piece about werewolves or vampires, let alone about Shub-
Niggurath or similar, would likely be considered false
advertising. But it was not always so. In the early twentieth
century, the terato-taxonomic membrane least breached
today, that between the Weird and the Hauntological,
was more likely to be permeated than that between ghosts
and 'traditional' monsters. The self-styled 'ghost stories'
of the 1920s might feature, say, giant flesh-sucking slugs
('Negotium Perambulans' and And No Bird Sings', by E.F.
Benson) .

As Handley points out, a ghost meant to the eighteenth-
century English just what it does to us now: a revenant, not
some eldritch oozing tentacled thing. At some point after
1800, however, that distinct ghost- ness of the ghost ebbed
- temporarily, as it turned out - until by 1910 Hodgson's
/M7<fe-Weird adventurer Carnacki could without embar-
rassment be described as a 'Ghost Finder' in his battles
with Hog-manifestations of 'million-mile-long clouds of
monstrosity'.

It is not so much irony as a constitutive contradic-
tion that it was a few years before that, in the mid-to-late
nineteenth century, almost precisely in the middle of that
trajectory of the de-ghosting ghost, that the key works of
what is now vaunted as a high ghostly, an edit hauntologic,
the 'tradition' of the English ghost story appeared.

2. Ancestral Spirits

The eighteenth-Century ghost was a revenant who
tended to moralism and anti-Popish sniping, embodying as
dread example lessons about virtue, justice, and so on. 33

33. Handley, Visions, 16-19.

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In the early nineteenth century, the explicitly sectarian
character of that moralism had waned, but the instructional
nature of hauntings remained.

Cultural production expressed anxiety over the sclerotic
arrogance of the Victorian era and its victims, as well as the
dominant culture's ideological counterattack, the tendency
to increased and cruder moralism. Non-mimetic art tends
to express such frictions particularly vividly, and in the
nineteenth century we can see the battle for the two souls
of the ghost in the fictions of Dickens, versus those of the
man he published, 34 Sheridan Le Fanu.

Dickens thinks nothing of jostling together, in A
Christmas Carol', the ghost of a person, Jacob Marley with
those of various Christmases. To post-hauntological eyes
this is a category-error, but Dickens is merely subordinating
the specifics of the ghost to his extreme and mawkish
extrapolation of the preceding epoch's tendency to morally
'mean' with spectrality In neither 'The Haunted House'
(1859) nor The Haunted Man' (1848) are the haunts
revenants of the dead, but 'of my own innocence', or a
doppelganger who performs a selective mnemectomy so
the story can thumpingly moralise that it is important
to remember wrong done to us 'that we may forgive it'.
Dickens's ghosts are apotheoses of the instructional ghosts
of the preceding century - out of time, rearguard in their
sentimentality, themselves haunted by the future. They
are not so much convincing, morally, as performatively
flourished. These are not modern ghosts, but the last,
already-dead walking dead of a dead epoch, bobbed about
on sticks.

34. Le Fanu's masterly 'Green Tea' appearing in All tlie Year Round in 1869.

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Le Fanu's ghosts, by contrast, in their moral contingency,
are intimations of disaster. 35 Even in his more seemingly
traditional 'moral' stories, such as 'Mr Justice Harbottle'
(1872), the nature of the spectral agents of revenge - their
inhuman, de-subject-ed strangeness, and the repeated
intimations that they, victims of injustice, are in hell ('pallid
[...] secretly suffering [...] glittering eyes and teeth') makes
sense according to no moral accounting. In the extraor-
dinary 'Green Tea' (1869), the text's insinuations that
Jennings's merciless torment at the hands of the abominable
monkey spirit is in some way payback - that he is 'guilty',
that he shows 'shame', though for what is unknown - read
as morally obscene.

The blurring of the Weird with the ghostly is prefigured in
the auditioning of animal spirits as avatars of the monstrous
(before the Weird's demand to be considered cephalopod
was clear), in the stark and amoral universe, in the proto-
plasmic formlessness of the dying vampire Carmilla (1872),
in the autotelos of the monster (the monkey in 'Green Tea'
just is) . For these reasons it is tempting to agree with Sullivan
that Le Fanu, rather than the more-usually-cited James, is
the key revolutionary figure in the so-called 'traditional'
ghost-story that we can now see was a - Weird-inflected -
'New Ghostly'.

However, while his fiction is if anything more vatic
and perspicacious than James's (shades of Hodgson and
Lovecraft), Le Fanu is a towering interstitial figure. The
popular story of his death is so theoretically kitsch on this
point that it could have been scripted by a cultural critic.
Le Fanu was reputedly a martyr to a recurring nightmare

35. Sullivan is excellent on this point, and I draw on him here extensively. Elegant
Nightmares, 32-68.

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about being crushed to death by the collapse of an old
grand mansion. When discovered dead, a horrified look
on his face, his doctor was said to have intoned: 'I feared
this. That house fell on him at last.' The story is tenacious,
which, in the face of the fact that it is almost certainly
untrue, 36 bespeaks its cultural resonance. Le Fanu's
problematic is the crisis and coming fall of the house of
Victoriana (and of the particular colonial upheavals of
fading Protestant Ascendancy), and as such foundational
to what followed; but the present of which it is a vivid
expression is the fringe of a past, rather than the start of a
future. His fiction is of end and failure.

The politics of sensory perception are important.
Le Fanu, in his masterwork 'Green Tea', stresses the
malevolent inhuman strangeness of the monkey, but also
that it was incorporeal. This was, in ghost-story terms, not
'New Ghostly' but 'new traditionalism', uniting Le Fanu
with Dickens and other pre-Weird, fabular-logic-wielding
ghost-smiths. As Victorian ghosts grew more ostentatiously
moralistic, they decorporealised. (In earlier centuries they
had moralised and provided the thrills of physicality: they
were often 'thought capable of moving material objects
and of inflicting physical harm [...] [and] those who were
confronted by ghosts believed that they could inflict material
damage by shooting or stabbing the spirit'.) 37

Central in marking him out as the key figure in this
peculiar period, later to be designated the birth of a ghost-
nation, Le Fanu's disciple M.R. James's ghosts could be
touched, and touch.

36. Jim Rockhill, 'Introduction' in J Sheridan Le Fanu, Mr Justice Harbottle and Others
(Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press, 2004). xii-xv.

37. Handley, Visions, 9.

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COLLAPSE IV

3. The Old New Weird Ghostly

James is regularly cited as a - or the - founder of the
'tradition' of English ghost stories. It is commonplace to
then wryly point out that James's ghosts are in fact often
not ghosts, but inhuman 'demons' of one sort or another. 38
Lovecraft stressed that James had 'invented] a new type
of ghost', not 'pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly
through the sense of sight' but 'lean, dwarfish, and hairy
- a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt
beast and man - and usually touched before it is seen'. 39 In
the rubble of the Lovecraft Event we can go further: the
adversaries of James's stories are disproportionately and
emphatically Weird.

• Touch and touchability is central. James's is the
horror of the physical universe (a trauma that would
trace into the obsessive materiality/-ism of Lovecraft's
horror). It is the cloth-ness of the notorious face 'of
crumpled linen' in 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You
My Lad' that makes it so terrible. James even names one
of his late stories 'The Malice of Inanimate Objects'. The
touchability of his 'ghosts' is not a return to that of their
18th-century cousins: this is a new (Weird) haptos, with
little to do with human somaticism, and everything to do
with the horror of matter. The most grotesque moment
in 'The Ash Tree' is the 'soft plump, like a kitten', with
which a just-glimpsed giant spider drops off the bed.

• James's repeated insistence that he is an 'antiquary'
is not convincing. He is acutely conscious of capitalist

38. See for example Rosemary Pardoe, 'MR James and the Testament of Solomon'
(1999). <http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/ArchiveSolIntro.html>

39. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror.

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modernity, and a surprising number of his 'ghosts'
manifest through it. The demon in 'Casting the Runes'
bizarrely announces its intent by means of an adver-
tisement in a railway carriage. The attack which the
runes occasion is brought down quite amorally on
whoever took them last, according to the deperson-
alised passings-on of bits of paper. The horror is of the
universal equivalent in mass commodification: the runes
are Bad Money. Most astonishingly, in 'The Diary of Mr
Poynter', what is haunted is not a scrap of fabric nor the
materials with which it is made but the design upon it: it is
the copied design, reprinted with explicitly cutting-edge
modern techniques, that is the locus for the apparition.
This is the work of hauntology in the age of mechanical
reproduction.

• James, like the haute Weird, is largely uninterested
in plot, subordinating it to his invented strangeness.
Unlike Lovecraft, who might simply dispense with it, to
present Weirdness in pulp bricolage, 'flashed out', as he
puts it, 'from an accidental piecing together of separated
things', 40 James goes through the motions of plot; but
i) his narrative arcs are utterly predictable, and ii) he
knows this, and repeatedly uses formulations like 'I
surely do not need to tell you . . .' or 'It will be redundant
to conclude...' or similar. This palpable impatience is
underlined by his later increasingly epigrammatic and
sparse stories. And like Borges, when he cannot be
bothered even with half-hearted narrative, James simply
describes his ideas freed of it, as in 'Stories I Have Tried
to Write'.

40. Lo

aft, 'TheCallofCthulhu'.

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COLLAPSE IV

• Most important, of his non-ghost 'ghosts', a dispro-
portionate number have appurtenances of the Weird,
and read now as startlingly teratologically ahead of
their time. His apparitions are hairy ('The Diary of Mr
Poynter', 'Canon Alberic's Scrapbook'), chitinous ('The
Ash-Tree'), slimy and/or amphibious ('The Treasure
of Abbot Thomas'), totally bizarre ('The Uncommon
Prayer-Book'), and more than once, tentacled ('The
Treasure of Abbot Thomas', 'Count Magnus') .

Today's ghost stories are, overwhelmingly, exclusively
hauntological, their figures revenant dead in time out of
joint. 41 This tradition misremembers itself into existence.
Many of its claimed foundation texts can only be so
anointed in an act of heroic misrepresentation. Neurotically
insistent on his own status as a ghost-story writer James
may have been (the titles of his collections reiterate: Ghost
Stones of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories ..., (1911), A
Thin Ghost and Others (1919), A Warning to the Curious and Other
Ghost Stories (1925)); however, thoughhe is often considered
to have perfected or inaugurated such hauntological work,
it is not, for the most interesting part, what defines James's
oeuvre.

41. Of the sixteen stories in the acclaimed recent collection of 'new ghost stories' Tlw
Dark (New York: Tor, 2003), various innovations of approach notwithstanding, there
is only really one story {'One Thing About the Night', by Terry Dowling) in which
the haunt is not a revenant function of the human (and it is not Weird, but the dark of
the collection's title). Even more telling is All Hallows, the journal of the Ghost Story
Society, that contains, according to its own guidelines, work 'in the style of the classic
supernatural tale', listing James as its first exemplar. Of the 23 stories in a recent
bumper issue [All Hallows 43, Summer 2007), one contains a hint of the genuinely
Weird (The Reflection', by S.D. Tullis, haunted both by ghosts and by the 'wrinkled
tentacles' (253) which may have trapped them in a mirror). For the others, two time-
slips and one imp aside, to be a ghost story is, reasonably enough but imwualively, and
in contradiction to James, definitionally to be a story of a ghost.

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Nor, though, did he write Weird in any straightfor-
ward sense. James does not have the visionary abandon of
later haute Weird. His use of more traditional ghosts and/
or occasional folk-ish figures is repeated alongside Weird
figures that in shortly forthcoming work would be repudia-
tions of them. James's corpus represents an under-one-roof
co-existence - that would be all but unsustainable at any but
that unique fulcrum moment - of what will later be seen to
be hauntology and the Weird, the oppositional dyad.

In this context, the key James story is without question
'Count Magnus'. Here, the 'strange form' from whose hood
projects 'the tentacle of a devil-fish' - a Weird, inhuman,
Cthulhoid figure who sucks faces from bones - is the servant
of 'a man in a lona; black cloak and broad hat', a malevolent
human ghost. This is an astounding crossover, its categoric
transgression eclipsing any Marvel-DC or Cerebus-meets-
Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtle shenanigans. James creates
the ultimate tag-team: Hauntology deploys Weird as its sidekick.

4. Jean Painleve's Quantum Vampire

There is, in 'Count Magnus', and in James in general,
no aufhebungoi the Weird and hauntological. The two are,
I suggest, in non-dialectical opposition, contrary iterations
of a single problematic - hence in 'Count Magnus' the
peculiarly literal and arithmetic addition of Weird to haunto-
logical (with the latter privileged, precisely because James
is, fundamentally, somewhat ghostlier than he is Weird) .

Alongside the fantasist's urge to literalise and concretise
problematics, modern - particularly geek - culture is char-
acterised by an accelerating circuit of teratogenesis, new
monsters endlessly produced and consumed (exemplified in
commodity form by the innumerable rpg and video-game

123

COLLAPSE IV

bestiaries; by the coquetry with which films hint at and
protect their 'monster shot'; by Pokemon, which deployed
the cultural addiction as its slogan: 'Gotta catch 'em all!').
If the contradiction between Weird and hauntological was
sublatable, then such drives would surely have led to the
monstrous embodiment of any putative 'resolved' third
term between Weird and haunt.

Nor is it difficult to imagine what such a synthesis would
be. The outstanding synecdochic signifier for a revenant
human dead is the skull - mind-seat now empty-eyed,
memento mori, grinning, screaming. 42 The nonpareil
iteration of the embodied Weird is the tentacle, and by
suspiciously perfect chance, the most Weird-ly mutable -
formless - of all tentacled animals is the octopus, the body of
which, a bulbous, generally roundish shape distinguished
by two prominent eyes, is vaguely homologous with a
human skull.

The shapes are ready, and take little to combine: the
Weird-hauntological monster is clearly a tentacled skull
(see facing page for my own rendition) .

Considering the fecundity and vigour of the teratological
drive, the symbolic resonance of its constituents and their
apparent topological compatibility for easy crossbreeding,
the extreme rarity of the skulltopus in culture is mysterious.
There are a very few examples, but the pickings are astound-
ingly meagre. 43 There is clearly something not right about

42. See for example The Sa-eaining Skull directed by Alex Nichol (1958); F. Marion
Crawford's 'The Screaming Skull' {in Uncanny Tales, London: T. Fisher Unwin,
1911).

43. There is a five-second animation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly2jNrl_
nro); an illustration (http://tachyonmkg.deviantart.com/art/skulltopusT1383138);
a hipster t-shirt (http://www.HowlingGoodTshirts.com/marketplace/87072931/
skulltopustshirt) ; and, most impressively, Becky Cloonan's cover illustration for

124

COLLAPSE IV

it - the two components may imply one another but are
resistant to syncrex, and the categorical unease this occasions
denies the figure proliferation. The Weird and the haunto-
logical generally relate to each other not by sublation, nor,
pace James, by addition, but by either-one-or-the-otherness,
in a manner suggestive of quantum superposition.

The author, with skull and octopus, yesterday.

Bataille's favourite anarcho-visionary marine biologist,
Jean Painleve, understood this. His 1945 'Le Vampire' 44
contains extraordinary footage of an octopus lasciviously
crawling over a human skull very similar to it in shape and

her comic East Coast Rising Volume 2 {Los Angeles: Tokyopop, 2008 (forthcoming)),
visible online at <http://stabstabstab.deviantart.com/art/wrist-hurts-in-color-
66012269>.

44. <wwwyoutube.com/watch?v=wjNhOuZCCLc>

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Mieville - Quantum Vampire

proportion. The octopus should, with that oozability of
Weird skin, merge with the skull to become a skulltopus.
That event is the asymptote of the interaction we see - but
of course it does not happen, because it cannot.

Le Vampire' (Science is Fiction BFIVD17190)

Instead, Painleve shows us the unstable haptic flirtation
of the two without merger. Those seconds are fleeting - the
intervening years have distinguished the traditions of
skull and octopus, and James's ingenious 'Count Magnus'
solution would be hard to pull off now - but are the heart
of the film (which otherwise pretends to be about vampire
bats and ticks) . They are the outstanding cultural example
of the superposition of Weird and hauntological. We cannot
sustain the skulltopus; as close as we can come is Painleve's
skull-and -octopus-interaction quantum vampire.

127

COLLAPSE IV

5. Neoliberalism, the Skull and the Octopus

Hauntology and Weird are two iterations of the same
problematic - that of crisis-blasted modernity showing its
contradictory face, utterly new and traced with remnants,
chaotic and nihilist and stained with human rebukes. We
can see these tendencies of the fantastic pulling at each other
in the years since James, who inaugurates their contrary
twinned birth, in waves of varying speeds depending on the
ideological moment. At times one or other iteration might
be dominant, but neither can ever efface the other. Opposed
but not separable, the traces of the Weird are inevitably
sensible in a hauntological work, and vice versa.

The degree to which one or the other has been stronger
has affected the tendency towards their separation as genres
of thought and pulp. Since the 1970s their 'separateness' has
become dominant, not because there is a 'drive to separate',
but as a corollary of the oscillating efficacy of as-simon-
pure-as-possible Weird and/or hauntology, for thinking our
fraught and oppositional history since the end of Keynes-
ianism, that great Cthulhu-swat and ghostbuster.

In quick and dirty caricature, with the advent of the
neoliberal 'There Is No Alternative, the universe was an
ineluctable, inhuman, implacable, Weird, place. More
recently, however, as Eagleton haunto-illiterately points out,
the ghosts have come back, in numbers, with the spectral
rebuke that there was an alternative, once, so could be
again.

We do not get to choose, however - and why would we
want to? If we live in a haunted world - and we do - we
live in a Weird one.

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COLLAPSE IV

The Corpse Bride:
Thinking with Nigredo

Reza Negarestani

The living and the dead at his command,
Were coupled, face to face, and hand to hand,
Till, chok'd with stench, in loath'd embraces tied,
The ling' ring wretches pin'd away and died. 1

The punishment imposed by Mezentius on the soldiers of
Aneas should be inflicted, by coupling him to one of his own
corpses and parading him through the streets until his carcass
and its companion were amalgamated by putrefaction. 2

1. Virgil, TheAeneid, VIII 483-88.

2. Erinensis, 'On the Exploitation of Dead Bodies', 'The Lancet, 1828-9: 777.

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COLLAPSE IV

A Prelude to Putrefaction

In the eighth book of Aeneid (483-88), Evander
attributes an outlandishly atrocious form of punishment
to Mezentius, the Etruscan King. However, it is not Virgil
who first speaks of this punishment, for before Virgil,
Cicero cites from Aristotle an analogy which compares the
twofold composite of the body and soul with the torture
inflicted by the Etruscan pirates. Revived during the reign
of the Roman Emperor Marcus Macrinus, the notoriety of
this atrocity survives antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the
sixteenth century, the horror of this torture is expressed,
once again, by a popular emblem called Mipta Contagioso
showing a woman being tied to a man plagued by syphilis,
at the King's order. Widely distributed throughout Europe,
the emblem continues to reappear in different contexts
during the Renaissance and even toward the nineteenth
century. Mipta Contagioso or Nupta, Cadavera literally suggests
a marriage with the diseased or the dead: a forcible
conjugation with a corpse, and a consummation of marriage
with the dead as a bride.

Haunted by the unusually philosophical insinuations
of this punishment as well as its subtle imagery, to which
human imagination cannot help contributing, Iamblichus
and Augustine - like Aristotle - ruminate on the Etruscan
torture. They both adopt it as something more than a
fundamental allegory in their philosophies: they see in
it a metaphysical model that exposes and explains the
condition(s) of being alive in regard to body, soul and
intellect. 3 Jacques Brunschwig, in his 1963 essay Aristote

3. For more details on Aristotle and the fragment on the psyche see A.P. Bos, The
Soul and its Instrumental Body: A Reinterpretation of Aristotle's Philosophy of Living Nature,
(Leiden: Brill, 2003).

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Negarestani - Corpse Bride

et ks pirates tyrrheniens, describes the baroque details of the
Etruscans' punishment. A living man or woman was tied to
a rotting corpse, face to face, mouth to mouth, limb to limb,
with an obsessive exactitude in which each part of the body
corresponded with its matching putrefying counterpart.
Shackled to their rotting double, the man or woman was
left to decay. To avoid the starvation of the victim and to
ensure the rotting bonds between the living and the dead
were fully established, the Etruscan robbers continued to
feed the victim appropriately. Only once the superficial
difference between the corpse and the living body started to
rot away through the agency of worms, which bridged the
two bodies, establishing a differential continuity between
them, did the Etruscans stop feeding the living. Once both
the living and the dead had turned black through putre-
faction, the Etruscans deemed it appropriate to unshackle
the bodies, by now combined together, albeit on an infini-
tesimal, vermicular level. Although the blackening of the
skin indicated the superficial indifferentiation of decay (the
merging of bodies into a black slime), for the Etruscans
- executioners gifted with metaphysical literacy and
alchemical ingenuity - it signalled an ontological exposition
of the decaying process which had already started from
within. Also known as the blackening of decay or chemical
necrosis, nigredo is an internal but outward process in
which the vermicular differentiation of worms and other
corpuscles makes itself known in the superficial register
of decay as that which undifferentiates. For the Etruscan
pirates, chemistry started from within but its existence was
registered on the surface, so to speak; explicit or ontologi-
cally registered decay was merely a superficial symptom of an
already founded decay, decay as a pre-established universal
chemistry. The victim could only be unshackled from the

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corpse and released when decay finished its ascension from
within to the surface. Therefore the so-called climax of the
punishment - the blackening of the body - coincides with
the superficial conclusion of decay, the exposition of decay
on an ontological level.

In a now lost piece, the young Aristotle makes a reference
to the torture practiced by the Etruscan pirates. 4 In that text,
Aristotle draws a comparison between the soul tethered to
the body and the living chained to a dead corpse (nekrous):

Aristotle says, that we are punished much as those were
who once upon a time, when they had fallen into the hands
of Etruscan robbers, were slain with elaborate cruelty; their
bodies, the living [corpora viva] with the dead, were bound
so exactly as possible one against another: so our souls, tied
together with our bodies as the living fixed upon the dead. 5

Whether this fragment points to a Platonic phase in the
philosophical life of Aristotle or not, it provides us with a
unique resource for discovering the less explicit ties between
his Metaphysics and De Anima. Accordingly, it also holds a
key for understanding the severed ties between Aristotle's
philosophy and that of Plato on the one hand and the
enduring bonds between Aristotle and Scholasticism on
the other. Yet more ambitiously, this fragment subtly points
to a moment in philosophy when both the philosophy of
Ideas and the science of being qua being are fundamen-
tally built upon putrefaction and act in accordance with
the chemistry of decay. It is the moment when beings must

4. Aristotle's fragment regarding the body-soul composite and the Etruscan torture
is believed to be a part of Eudemus or Protreptiaa.

5. Quoted by Cicero from Aristotle in Hortensius. Also see Saint Augustine Against
Julian (Writings of Saint Augustine, V. 16), (Washington, DC: The Catholic University
of America, 1957). Augustine uses the same quote from Cicero.

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undergo necrosis and decay in order to remain in being and
the Ideas must be founded on an intensive necrosis and an
extensive decay in order to remain in their essence and to
synthesize with other Ideas. In other words, this moment
marks a necessity for Ideas - even the Idea of ontology itself:
in order to be active intensively and extensively, inwardly
and outwardly, the Idea must first be fully necrotized and
blackened on all levels, intensively and extensively.

The following is a disorganized venture - more in line
with grave robbers and necrophiles than with archaeolo-
gists and scholars of history - to disinter the twist inherent
to the fragment associated with Aristotle and to delve into
the moment when, prior to all arrangements and establish-
ments, a pact with putrefaction must be made; the moment
of nucleation with nigredo, as we must call it.

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Necrophilic Reason

Aristotle's fragment regarding the Etruscan torture
bears a deeply pessimistic irony; it is not the supposedly
living body which is tethered to a corpse to rot, because it
is exactly the soul qua living which is bound to a corpse -
namely the body. For Aristotle, the soul, as the essence of a
being, needs a body to perform its special activities, and it
is the responsibility of the soul to be the act of the intellect
upon the body. Therefore this necrocratic confinement is
both the price and a means of having a body as instrument,
and then using this instrument to govern and eventually
unite beings. The soul, in this sense, has two activities,
inward and outward. The outward activity of the soul is the
actualization of the body according to the active intellect
(nous) which is immortal; in other words the extensive
activity of the soul is the animation of the body according
to the ratio (reason) derived from the nous, the intensive
and inward activity of the soul. The inward activity of the
soul is its unitive activity according to the intellect as the
higher genus of being qua being. The intensive activity of
the soul is the act of bringing the universe into unison with
the intellect according to ratio; for this reason, the intensive
activity of the soul coincides with the enduring of the
soul in its relation to the intellect, which itself is internal
to the soul. Here, the intensive and extensive, inward and
outward activities of the soul must be in accordance with
one another in order for the world to be intelligible and, in
its intelligibility, to move toward intellect in proportion to
reason.

If the intelligibility of the world must thus imply a
'face to face' coupling of the soul with the body qua dead,
then intelligibility is the epiphenomenon of a necrophilic

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intimacy, a problematic collusion with the rotting double
which brings about the possibility of intelligibility within
an inert cosmos. The intelligibility allotted to the body
as corpora cadavera by ratios of the intellect (or reasons) -
each inherent to a different type or gradation of the soul
- animates the world according to the intellect. Yet in doing
so, reason reanimates the dead rather than bestowing life
upon it; for in terms of the Aristotelian body qua cadaver,
intelligibility is the reanimation of the dead according to
an external agency. Reason grounds the universe not only
on a necrophilic intimacy but also in conformity with an
undead machine imbued with the chemistry of putrefaction
and nigredo.

Both in Etruscan torture and in Aristotle's fragment,
the living or the soul is tied to the dead or the body face to
face. The Greco-Roman motif of the mirror is obviously at
play here; one sees itself as the other, the perfect matching
double. However, the great chain of philosophers from
Aristotle to Augustine and beyond only tell us about one
side of the mirror, shamelessly underestimating the under-
standing of both the living and the dead. They tell us that
the soul sees itself as the dead party whilst chained to the
body. But this is surely a ridiculous attempt to unilateralise
the mirror motif, for not only does the living see itself as
dead, but the dead also looks into the eyes of the living, and
its entire body shivers with worms and dread. It is indeed
ghastly for the living to see itself as dead; but it is true
horror for the dead to be forced to look at the supposedly
living, and to see itself as the living dead, the dead animated
by the spurious living. Neither Aristotle nor Augustine tell
us about this infliction upon the dead of the burden of the
living, this molesting of the dead with the animism of the

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living. It is the Barbarians who formulated and exposed
the ulterior cruelty of the Etruscan torture in retaliation for
the Romans' atrocities: they slaughtered their own cattle,
disembowelled them and then forced the Romans inside
the carcasses in such a way that only the talking heads of
the soldiers protruded. In doing so, they exhibited the farce
of vitalism by ventriloquising the dead with the living.

The binding of the soul to the body as a tying of
the living to the dead is later arithmetically captured by
Aristotle in the formulation of a metaphysical model which
is best understood arithmetically, or at least geometrically,
as scholastic philosophers preferred. In vitalizing matter
and actualizing it, the soul needs a body as an apparatus by
which the universe of beings can be led toward the intellect
which causes the noumenal universe to exist. In order both
to use and to be used by the body under the direction of the
intellect, the soul must first remain in itself. And conversely,
in remaining in itself, the soul must animate the body and
bring about the synthesis and unification of bodies. In other
words, in simultaneously governing beings and conducting
them toward being qua being (higher genera of being), the
soul must first remain in itself and extend beyond itself. For
Aristotle, this metaphysical model, the model of intelligible
ontology, is arithmetically distilled as aphairesis (apo+airein,
abstraction), a taking away or subtraction. As an Aristo-
telian mathematical procedure, aphairesis consists in two
vectors of operation, of negative and positive directions in
regard to each other, in diametric opposition but synergisti-
cally continuous and reinforcing. For aphairesis, as taking
away or subtraction, emphasises simultaneously removal
(that which is taken away) and conservation (that which is
left behind by removal) - the removed and the remainder.
A soul coupled with the body mixes with the impure -

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since the body debases its essence - and at the same time
approaches being qua being by remaining in itself (i.e. by
ascending in its purity). For Aristotle, only subtraction can
make such double-headed and simultaneous mobilization
possible. Aphairesis or subtraction, accordingly, maps the
vectors of the mobilization and effectuation of reason. Aphairesis
is thus a procedure whereby the soul can be captured simul-
taneously in the sense of its belongings (or bodies) and in
its movement toward nous which sheds those belongings as
it approaches the intellect - an arithmetic formulation of
the Etruscan metaphysical cruelty 6

The Aristotelian procedure of aphairesis, or subtraction,
as a formulation for the metaphysical model of intelligible
ontology, resurfaces explicitly during the Middle Ages -
especially during the period known as High Scholasticism
(1250-1350) - creeping beneath metaphysical systems,
alchemical models and theological creeds. However, before
affecting scholasticism, Aristotle's model implicitly exerts its
forbidden influence on Neo-Platonism, especially through
apophatic or negative theologians for whom the ineffa-
bility of God must be exposed by aphairesis or abstraction.
Plotinus states that the reality of the One (hen) cannot be
explained through the epistemological registers or attributes
(belongings) which it shares with humans. Therefore, the
Divine must be stripped of all its belongings by aphairesis,

6. Aphairesis, as a subtractive correlation between the soul and the body, simultaneously
offers the soul the capacity of having a body as an instrument or belonging, and the
opportunity of preserving its ultimate correlation with intellect. Arithmetically in
aphairesis or subtraction, the amount that is negated or taken away marks the dying
correlation of a magnitude with its belongings (as the correlation of the soul with the
mortal body). The amount that remains after subtraction, however, represents the
correlation between the remainder and that which continues to remain regardless
of the magnitude of subtraction. This can be expressed as the undying correlation
between the soul and the intellect.

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a procedure which takes away all that exists extraneously
and negatively contributes to all that remains and itself
progressively diminishes (becoming sublime). Here, the
conceptual abstraction of aphairesis returns to Aristotle's
subtractive model, seeded within his fragment on the
Etruscan torture: the coupling of the soul with the body
qua belonging is necessary in order to shed belonging and
lead toward being qua being. This is so given that being
qua being is a genus of being which persists and remains
under any condition or environment synthesized by other
beings whatsoever. In other words, being qua being is that
which continues to remain after all belongings are shed,
removed and taken away. This is what makes aphairesis the
fundamental procedure in revealing or exposing the One,
as employed for the most part by neo-Platonists such as
Plotinus and Proclus.

Both Aristotle's and Plotinus' formulations of aphairesis
are grounded on one precondition, which can be summarized
in terms of conservation after subtraction: despite being chained
to the festering corpse or being subtracted, the soul is able
to conserve some of itself and render the body intelligible.
In the same vein, no matter what is taken away from
the Divine, it will continue to remain as the One already
there. Correspondingly, if magnitude Y is subtracted from
magnitude X the result can be either zero, or x (where x
is a remainder from X). Both Aristotle, in regard to the
soul vis-a-vis the intellect (as part of the soul which remains
under any condition), and Plotinus, in regard to the One,
take conservation of a remainder for granted. The world
cannot be intelligible and move toward intellect without the
assumption that the subtraction or mortification of the soul
by the body does not lead to the total erasure of the soul in

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the first place. Aristotle's system of metaphysics is thus built
upon an assumption which has been taken for granted:
that for every subtraction, there is a possibility of conserva-
tion in the form of a remainder, and for every remainder,
the possibility of persistence in remaining, i.e. a resistance
toward further subtraction through remaining in itself.

The coupling of the soul with the body could indeed
lead to the instant mortification of the soul, thus eliminating
the possibility of the soul's conferring intelligibility on the
universe. But this is not the case, for the soul remains in
itself and brings about the possibility of intelligibility. For
this reason, the possibility of intelligibility is based on the
possibility having a conserved part or remainder after
subtraction - that is, the continued possibility of the soul
after coupling with the dead and being putrefied by its rotting
double. Only when this possibility is taken as a determin-
able and certain possibility can reason be associated with
the intelligibility that issues forth from nous. The persistence
of the soul in conserving its essence, or the determination
of the One in remaining, certainly wards off the threat of
becoming the dead qua the body or belonging; but only at
the cost of becoming intimate or problematically hooked
up with the dead. We shall now see how the insistence in
remaining so or conservation in regard to subtraction pushes
the soul to a more rotten depth of nigredo, and how reason
exhumes a more problematic intimacy with the nekrous.

Horror in the Negative

Subtraction is an economical mobilization of non-be-
longing in two directions: (1) the shedding of belongings
or extension by means of expendable belongings;
(2) remaining or intensive resistance against the

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expendability of belongings. The subtractive procedure
of aphairesis bifurcates into two directionally opposite but
synergistic vectors - the extensive and intensive vectors
of subtraction. The outward and extensive vector of
subtraction is the one by which belongings are taken away
or by which the soul can extend beyond itself via a body.
The latter, however, is the vector of remaining so and as
such. As the inward vector of subtraction, remaining - or,
more accurately, the persistence of the remainder - char-
acterizes an intensive vector of subtraction whereby that
which continues to remain brings about the possibility of
being qua being or the Ideal. It is the persistence of the soul
in remaining after its katabatic contact with the body that
opens up the opportunity of its coming into unison with
the intellect. Similarly, only that which continues to remain
despite being stripped of its belongings or attributes can
eventuate the One (hen) and the Idea of being qua being;
for once again, being qua being is 'being in remaining so
and as such'. To this extent, not only must the soul remain
after its necromantic contact with the body, but also at
least a part of it must continue to remain. In other words,
Aristotle's model of conservation (viz., having a conserved
part after subtraction) might be based on the determin-
ability of having a remainder in the first place, but it mainly
concerns the continuation of the remainder.

Having a remainder after subtraction is not sufficient
for the march toward the intellect, or for the exposition
(explanation) of the Idea of being qua being. The remainder
must continue to remain - this is the insinuation of the meta-
physical model of conservation. The possibility of the
remainder is necessary but not sufficient, for its sufficiency
lies in the possibility of the remainder in remaining.

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The remainder as an exposed and determinable quantity
must be hosted by the indeterminable vector continued
remaining, namely, to remain. The remainder alone as a
determinable quantity is exposed by what is subtracted,
but to remain, or in other words, to persist in remaining,
coincides with the continuation of subtraction - a greater
and greater subtraction. In short, the more the remaining
persists, the more it is subtracted, the less the remainder
gets. Persistence in remaining means to shrink more,
because the act of remaining coexists with the progression
of subtraction. To remain is at the same time a persistence
in subtraction (hence mobilization of the vector that takes
away belongings) and the continuation of the remainder in
remaining less. R as the remainder reveals something already
there, but persistence or continuation in remaining suggests
insistence on what is always already there and can only be
perpetuated through rs smaller than R. A system of cosmo-
genesis whose Ideals and infinities have been established
prior to its building processes - as the ones already there - has
a certain destiny with regard to the horror genre: Its horror
stories are inherently concerned with decay even if they
deal with other themes and dabble in other affairs.

To provide further clarification as to how the continua-
tion of the remaining or remaining in itself is only possible
in remaining less - subtractive extension and diminutive
intention - the procedure of aphairesis can be mathemati-
cally (albeit schematically) demonstrated. Take two
geometrical magnitudes A and B, where A > B as the Ideal
ground of the procedure and a guarantee for its continu-
ation (iterative subtraction). The procedure starts by
subtracting the greatest multiple of the smaller magnitude
B (henceforth mB) from the greater multiples of the greater
magnitude A: A - mB = R. The result of the subtraction as

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hitherto a conserved part is the remainder R which is less
than the smaller magnitude B (R< B). Since the remainder
R is less than the smaller magnitude B, the procedure is
continued by subtracting the greatest multiple of the
remainder R (henceforth nR) from the smaller magnitude
B: B - nR = r'. The result of the subtraction is again a
remainder but it is less than the previous remainder (r' <
R). The procedure of subtraction (aphairesis) will continue
in this way to reveal that which remains as the one already
there. For this reason, the persistence in remaining or the
act of remaining (to remain) - as the continual result of the
subtractive operation - can only invest itself in remaining less
and as ontological decay. The continuity of remaining and
thus the revelation of the One (already there) and being qua
being (being in remaining so and as such) is only attainable,
and must be conducted, through diminution and decay:
R>r'>r"> ...

Expanding
(of the removed)

^Sh ^

explicit subtraction

implicit subtraction

Shrinking
(of the remainder)

com-plication

ex-plication

Fig. 1 . Extensive and intensive vectors of subtraction

The tenacity of the soul - as an act of the intellect upon
the body - in conserving its inner parts brings life to the
universe as an intelligible principle. Yet this insistence on
survival or remaining introduces decay and nigre&o into
both intelligibility and vitality. The persistence of the

remainder in remaining (viz., to remain) is submission to
the de facto reign of putrefaction, the universal of intelli-
gibility and the particular of a problematical openness to
the dead. For the body which is nourished by the soul, the
mandatory submission of the soul to decay (diminutio or
lessening) is in fact the mimesis of the dead by the soul. By
mimicking the dead, the soul can repose intimately with the
dead until it is reclaimed through reason by the intellect.
But the exposition of the intellect is too contingent upon
its correlation with the soul through reason which is itself
aligned with decay or the intensive diminution undertaken
by the soul. Accordingly, to remain as such is equal to
intensive diminution coupled and differentially connected
to extensive decay 7 - the shriveling soul whose continuity
extends to the necrotized body through the worms which
twist in and out of it:

For as the Etruscans are said often to torture captives by
chaining dead bodies [nekrou.i\ face to face with the living, fitting
part to part, so the soul seems to be extended throughout and affixed
to all the sensitive members of the body. 8

Mapping the vector of intensive decay or diminution,
the act of remaining bridges the gap between the
subtractive extension and the interiorization of no-thing

7. In medieval literature and painting, the intensive and extensive vectors of decay
are imagined as a shriveling body from which a cosmic range of other beings emerge.
While the shriveling body which folds back upon itself visually narrates the intensive
aspect of decay, worms, corpuscles and other nameless beings which come forth from
the contracting body stand for the extensive vector of decay As the inheritor of the
alchemical tradition, Giordano Bruno sees the intensive decay of the shriveling body
in the caput mortuum (death's head) or the residuum of a substance after its attributes
have been extracted by distillation, while the extensive vector of decay is seen by
Leibniz as worms which contain smaller worms, ad infinitum

8. Iamblichus, Pmtreptiau 8, (Leipzig, 1893), 47. 21-48.

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or no remainder. If the soul must conserve the inner parts
of itself (corresponding to the higher genera of being qua
being) after coupling with the body, then it must remain
itself at the same time as extending beyond itself. However,
as argued above, remaining (as of the soul) is not possible
except through remaining less, that is to say as intensive
diminution of the remaining. Yet what is the guarantor of
remaining per se, or to be exact, what guarantees that the
remaining shrinks and becomes less? Keeping in mind that
remaining in itself is remaining less, intensive diminution is
reinforced by extensive subtraction. The answer is that
only through the interiorization of nothing qua non-be-
longing, can remaining continue to remain, or to be precise,
continue to remain less. Without nothing being interiorized
diachronically within the remaining, the remaining cannot
continue to become less and thus persist. This nothing qua
non-belonging cannot be simply equal to the exhaustion
of the remaining; nor can it be equated with the Idea of
being qua being (viz., the One) which sheds belongings.
In other words, nothing as the guarantee of 'continuation
in remaining' is neither the content of the exhaustion, nor
can it be taken as correlated with the remaining. Interest-
ingly, the reasons for this resistance toward correlation with
what remains and what is removed lies in the premises of
the act of remaining - persistence in remaining assumes
two basic Ideas: diminution or shrinkage, and continuity
in diminution. Not only must that which remains/survives
become less, it must also maintain continuity in lessening.
For this reason, the guarantor of remaining must simul-
taneously be the impetus of the intensive diminution
and induce a continuity in remaining (in remaining less)
from outside. The guarantor must be autonomous and
separate from that which remains, because if correlated

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with that which remains, it will be indexed by exhaustion.
Yet the guarantor cannot be the subject of exhaustion for if it
were then it could not maintain and guarantee the lessening
of the remaining, that is to say, the continuity of remaining.
What is itself consumed cannot sufficiently guarantee the
exhaustion of that which correlatively succeeds it.

In short, if the guarantor of remaining is correlated with
the act of remaining, it will be indexed by exhaustion and
thus cease to influence. Any disruption in the influence of
this guarantor induces a discontinuity in the persistence in
diminution, which in fact is the continuation of remaining.
Moreover, the guarantor of remaining should not be sought
in the extensive vector of subtraction by which belongings
are taken away, because the subtracted magnitude cannot
influence the fate of remaining magnitude. Therefore,
not only must this guarantor evade correlation with that
which remains (something), but it must also inspire the
act of remaining, or in intensive terms, remaining less
or diminution. Exterior to the Idea of ontology (namely
remaining), the guarantor of remaining as such is nothing

- the impossibility of being correlated either with what is
removed or with what remains. To this extent, this impos-
sibility of correlation and belongings entails both diachron-
icity and exteriority. The guarantor of remaining - no-thing

- must be diachronic and external to the remaining,
otherwise the remaining cannot maintain its continuity,
whose ontological constitution is anchored by remaining
less. By approximating no-thing as radical exteriority, the
remaining can continue to remain and shed its belongings,
that is to say, it can remain less or remain in itself.
Remaining in itself is the medium of being qua being and
hence the medium by which union with the intellect and

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the exposition (revelation) of the One is possible. But this
medium only takes on its structure in so far as the remaining
approximates or limitropically approaches no-thing or the
impossibility of belonging in order to maintain an intensive
diminution necessary for remaining less or remaining in
itself. Intensive diminution is in itself synchronous only by
virtue of its disjunction with a diachronic exteriority which
ontologically underpins the continuity of the remaining in
remaining less.

In order to remain in any instance, first of all nothing,
as impossibility of belonging, must be prioritized and
postulated in its exteriority. The reason for this prioriti-
zation of nothing as a non-correlatable exteriority is to
satisfy the prerequisite ontological status required for effec-
tuation of the remainder in any instance. This prerequisite
status is the intensive diminution or remaining less, for
the diminution of the remaining is nothing but remaining
as such. In subtraction, diminution or intensive decay is
at the same time a solution to the problem of remaining
and the very ontological constitution of the remaining
per se. However, this solution simply cannot work, or in
other words, is not able to be correlated with its problem,
unless nothing as radical exteriority is taken as a necessity.
In order to shed belongings and remain less, the uncorrect-
able primacy of non-belonging must be affirmed. In other
words, nothing must be prioritized prior to all arrangements
and establishments of the remainder.

Accordingly, something that remains, or something in
general - as that which remains - always testifies to the
bindingor interiorization of nothing as priority and primacy.
In the persistence of its remaining, the remainder must shed
its belongings (or remain less) by affirming the primacy of

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nothing, for only nothing, as the impossibility of belonging,
can guarantee the continuing shedding of belongings.
This relation between solution and problem, secured by
means of the prioritization of nothing, can be explained in
Aristotelian terms as well: Chained to the body, the soul
cannot bring the universe into unison with the intellect
or bring about the possibility of progression toward nous
(the problem) unless it continues to remain according to an
inner part of itself, conserving the innermost depths of its
essence (the solution) . Here the solution, which pertains to
remaining, cannot be correlated with the problem without
submitting to the priority of nothing or - in terms of the
soul - the void. The soul must submit to the priority and
primacy of nothing or the void in order to solve its problem
in regard to the intellect.

In short, intensive diminution or remaining less is the
solution to the problem of remaining, but this solution
itself must bind the priority and primacy of nothing to the
fullest extent. In this sense, nothing as exteriority is interi-
orized to provide that which remains with the ontological
constitution requisite in remaining as such - but only as a
problematic bond with nothing, which, as the impossibility
of belonging, cannot be relieved through being captured
by correlation. If nothing qua non-belonging is uncorrect-
able, then it is the embracing of nothing by the soul or the
living that becomes the manifest problematic. In order to
survive or enlighten with life, the soul must either sleep
with the dead, or accede to the priority and primacy of the
void as its internal guide. What could be worse for vitalism
than at once being animated through a necrophilic alliance,
and simultaneously, protected under the aegis of the void?
It is decay that provides the bridge between the latter

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(the problematic embracing of nothing) and the former
(the subtractive bond with the body or belonging). That
which arises from death can only peacefully repose among
the dead, as living.

The interiorization of nothing through which the
remainder continues to remain and is subjected to
ontological shrinkage by remaining in itself, deploys a
subtractive vector which is implicit in remaining. This inter-
nalized or implicit subtractive vector corresponds with the
persistence of the remainder, or more precisely, it coincides
with the survival of the remainder in its resistance to the
explicit subtractive vector through which belongings are
exteriorized. The medium of survival and its constitution
are thus, problematically, the implicit apparatus of death. It
is in this sense that the persistence of that which remains -
the innermost depth of the soul, the intellect or the One - is
ultimately indeterminable; for it is not only determined by
the exteriorization of belongings but also by that nothing to
which it must implicitly submit in order to remain (less).
Once the intellect, as the highest genus of being qua being,
is deprived of its determinability reason, in its mission to
redeem the world on behalf of the intellect, reclaims the
world for a problematic death qua life instead.

As for Plotinus' metaphysics, the horror of abstraction
(aphairesis) is akin to the horror implicit in the Idea of
ontology or remaining as such: the apogee of the One is
undermined by another culmination which emphatically
precedes it, yet cannot be chronically culminated. The
search for the Ideal turns out to be a sub rosa search for
the problematic on behalf of nothing, conducted all along
through the bottom-up chemistry and differential dynamics
of decay and putrefaction. As we shall see, the guarantor of
any Idea of persistence, regardless of its Ideal or telos, is

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nothing. Remaining might be a solution in regard to finding
a medium through which the Ideal can be explained, but
such a solution brings with it the problems inherent to the
clandestine alliance with nothing. Persistence under any
subtractive condition is definitely a fitting solution for the
revelation of the One and the effectuation of being qua
being, but this solution was already infested with problems
which do not belong here. Our survival or continuation
in remaining is indeed a vitalistic solution, but it is not
an authentic or genuine one, for it inherently transmits
an entirely alien set of problems to which it can neither
correlate nor belong. Survival, in this sense, is the remobi-
lization of problems whose nature is radically detrimental
to our solutions.

In contrast to the exteriorization of belongings, the
exteriority of nothing in its primacy is internalized in order
that the remainder might remain and survive. Remaining
is a trajectory whose continuity is described by the removal
of its attributes and belongings, but whose continuation is
guaranteed only by its diminution and decay. To stave off
the realism of the dead which follows from its coupling with
the body, the soul disguises its putrefaction as survival; that
is to say, reformulates the problem of decay according to
new correlations with its own Ideals and reasons. However,
in distracting the dead, the soul is exposed to problems
whose concerns belong neither to the living nor to the
dead. Katabasis/ or the descent of the soul, is not radical
enough, for it conveys the profit-seeking openness of the
soul to the body as an instrument, an economical openness

9. In Greco-Roman ritualistic tradition, katabasis refers to a journey which is
characterized by descent (usually to the underworld). Katabasis is a depthwise and
pro-ground {profundus) movement; for that reason, in scholastic alchemy, it is often
associated with nigredo or depthwise and intensive decay.

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based on mutual affordability. Yet it is exactly this conser-
vationist affordance of the soul-body composite that causes
the soul to be cracked open by nothing from within. The
first descent of the soul is only a twist that opens the soul
on to an ultimate katabasis where the soul is directly - albeit
problematically - fettered to nothing, kept alive to rot away
in and for itself. It is here that Aristotle's analogy of the
relation between body and the soul with the tribulation
imposed by the Etruscan pirates proves to be, if not wrong,
then problematic; for it sincerely suggests the necrotiza-
tion of the soul by the body only to divert attention from a
second necrosis, blacker than the first.

The soul is necrotized in its mission to govern the
universe and vitalize matter according to the intellect. In full
conformity with its vitalistic intention, the soul assumes an
intimacy with nothing: it is invaded by nothing from behind
(a tergo) . The second necrosis of the soul - shrouded in the
explicit cruelty of the first - is its unbreakable and wilful
bond contracted with nothing in order to remain, a tie fully
based on reason. It is only in the second necrosis that the
climax of the Etruscan torture finds its proper narrative.
The fastening of the living to the dead is a culmination
from the perspective of a collective gathering, but surely
of minor interest when we know that the living, the soul,
is itself rotting. The real climax of the Etruscan torture,
for this reason, is the feeding of the living while strapped to
the dead. It is only this second necrosis that fully suggests
the culmination of the Etruscan torture: while tethered
to nothing, the soul qua remainder continues to live, as
its continuation in remaining (less) is guaranteed by the
primacy and priority of nothing. Bound to nothing, the
remainder effectuates the act of remaining in the form

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of diminution and decay whilst fastened to nothing as a
constitutional primacy. The two necroses of the soul, to this
extent, can be categorized, as regards of their extensive and
intensive development {-plication) in metaphysical cruelty
and nigrescent katabasis, as explicit and implicit necroses of the
soul. The former - the explicit necrosis of the soul - is the
coupling with the body qua cadavera in order for the soul to
extend beyond itself by means of subtracted or necrotized
belonging (the body). The latter - the implicit necrosis of
the soul - is entailed by the internalization of nothing in its
primacy in order to shed belongings and remain in itself.
The two necroses of the soul upon which the universe and
intellect are fixed bring about the possibility of ontology as
a great chain of corpses whose arrangement is determined
by their explicit and implicit indulgence in necrophilia.
Aristotle fully exposes the first necrosis only to exploit its
explicit drama to conceal the second.

The Idea and the worms

The subtractive correlation between vitalism and matter,
we argued, is accomplished by means of explicit necrosis,
or the soul-body composite according to Aristotle's system.
Yet the explicit necrosis is linked to an implicit necrosis
whose necessity is fully supported and affirmed by reason.
For the sake of clarity, we shall delineate the nature of the
second necrosis before moving forward: The subtractive
correlation between matter and vitalism is intensively
conducted through a medium which constitutes the very
Idea of ontology - that is, of remaining so and as such. Yet
remaining as remaining less - diminution or intensive decay
- requires a guarantee whereby it can be perpetuated or at
least made possible in both its lessening and its continuity.

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While this guarantor cannot be included by the extensive
and intensive vectors of subtraction, it can be problemati-
cally posited in such a way that the remaining can maintain
its diminution and continuity by approaching it as a limit
process. This guarantor is the impossibility of belonging
or the disjunctive nothing which, once presupposed by
the remainder, can impose the continuous shedding of
belongings. Recall that the shedding of belongings is
registered extensively as the subtractive extension or exte-
riorization of belongings, and intensively as remaining, or
more accurately, remaining less. In a similar vein, Plotinus'
procedure of aphairesis or abstraction exposes the One
through remaining as an ontological medium, but in doing
so it exerts the imposition of nothing or no-one. It is in
this sense that for both Aristotle and Plotinus, the medium
of revelation for the Ideal (that which continues to remain
under any subtractive magnitude) is diminution and
intensive decay. Yet this is not the only twist inherent to the
problem of exposing or explaining the Ideal. The second -
implicit - necrosis brings a far more convoluted twist to the
assumed correlations between the Ideal, the problem and
the solution.

We argued that both the intellect and the One as the
Ideal posit problems in regard to their ontological status
(being qua being) as related to the universe or beings.
Speaking somewhat reductively part of the problem posited
by the intellect regards channelling the progression of the
universe into unison according to reason. Likewise, the
problem posed by the One is the exposition of the One as
the Ideal of being qua being - that is to say, the exposition
of the One as that which is indifferent to, or even resists,
the subtractive mobilization of belongings. The solution

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lies in the establishment of an ontological medium which
not only reinforces subtraction but also remains in itself
and according to the Ideal. In other words, to settle the
problem of exposing Ideals, the solution must abide by the
ontological status of 'the Ideal as that which withstands any
subtractive magnitude'. For this reason, the solution must
be correlated both to subtraction and to the ontological
medium of the Ideal. Although correlated to subtraction
from one side, the ontological intension of the solution must
only correspond to that of the Ideal. Otherwise it undoes
the problem by dispossessing it of its assumed ground.

Now, if the ontological intention of the Ideal is indifferent
to subtraction, then in order to explain the Ideal, the solution
must expose the continuity of the Ideal in remaining, or
more accurately, the intractability of the Ideal in regard
to subtraction. Accordingly, then, remaining in itself - or
in other words, remaining as such - constitutes the solution.
However, as argued, in order to expose the Ideal, remaining
as such must correspond to the act of remaining less, which is
impossible without the intervention of nothing. Therefore,
the solution (viz., remaining as an ontological medium)
radically betrays the Ideal because, firstly, it submits to
the priority and the primacy of nothing; and secondly, it
internalizes the disjunctive exteriority of nothing in order to
realize and authenticate itself. To this extent, if the Ideal is to
be explained (the problem), the solution must essentially be
posed on behalf of nothing because only through remaining
less, or more exactly, decay (the solution), can the Ideal, the
problem and the solution encompass each other as Idea. As
the medium cementing the Idea in its most concrete - albeit
volatile - form, decay or remaining (less) entails nothing on
both planes of exteriority and interiority because through

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the intervention of nothing, the true Idea of remaining can
be underpinned in its continuity, diminution and being.
The Idea of something as that which remains or survives
subtraction even transiently points to the essentially
duplicitous nature of this intervention. The intervention or
imposition of nothing in its priority and primacy ensures
the act of remaining and persistence of something, but at the
same time this vitalistic triumph takes place by remaining
less or approximating nothing. To put it differently, the
imposition of nothing imparts an inherently duplicitous
nature to the Idea of ontology: remaining is at the same
time a vitalistic persistence and an intensive decay on the
part of a problematic intimacy with nothing. Decay conveys
this duplicity in the most subtle manner where the Idea of
remaining per se becomes that of remaining less and the Idea of
ontology as such coincides with the second necrosis.

Correlated to this double-dealing solution, not only is
the problem betrayed, but also the Ideal is undermined
by virtue of its correlation with the problem. Rather than
securing the Ideal as ground, the correlation between the
solution (i.e. remaining) and the problem (i.e. explaining
the Ideal) perforates and ungrounds the Ideal with nothing.
If the correlation between solution and problem is built
upon a double-betrayal and the duplicity of solution, then
such correlation twists itself out of its assumed intension
rather than terminating it - That is, given that this assumed
intention is either that of exposing the Ideal or that of effec-
tuating the Idea of something (anything) through remaining.
The Idea of correlation - that is, the correlation between
solution and problem - does not need to be terminated so
that nothingcan be imposed. On the contrary, the correlation
per se is what is fundamentally needed to bring about the

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imposition of nothing as the exposition of the problematic.
By problematic we mean the submission to the priority
of nothing in order to effectuate the Idea of something or
the short-circuiting of ontological intention with the inter-
vention of nothing in order to bring about the possibility
of ontology. In pursuing the ontological intension of the
Ideal, the correlation between the solution and the problem
traffics and imposes the intention of nothing as the implicit
constitutional necessity and the radical exterior of the Ideal
and its intention. Correlation, in this sense, is equal to the
very Idea of twist {fledere), for which inflection (pursuing
the intension of correlativity) is already a deflection
(inviting that which is radically exterior to that intention) .
In twisting into something, the correlation between solution
and problem, twists into nothing; and in twisting into
nothing such correlation twists back into something. Only
through these twists in and out can the Idea of something
be resonant. The correlation between solution and problem
is effectuated as intensive decay or depthwise putrefaction
(nigredo), but it is the twist of correlation that makes for
the peculiarly vermicular sinuosity of implicit putrefaction,
the second necrosis. If the explicit necrosis, the coupling of
the soul with the body is differentially consummated by
worms' bridging of the dead and the supposedly living, the
second necrosis or the tie between the soul and the intellect
is vermicularly completed by the correlation as twist.

By adhering to remaining so and as such as a fitting
ontological medium, the One submits to the intension of
that which bores through it. Once the Idea of correlation is
established, it refracts toward the problematic and is adopted
by the Idea of twist. As what necessitates the intervention
of nothing, the correlation between solution and problem

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renders the fate of being something entirely problematic. At the
same time it makes the destinies of the Ideal, the problem
and the solution indeterminable in themselves by factoring
in the exteriority of nothing as another determinant to
which they have no access and over which they have no
influence. Given that the destiny of the Ideal is to survive
at all costs, the destiny of the problem is to expose the
Ideal and the destiny of the solution is to locate (chorizein)
an ontological medium that encompasses the problem, the
Ideal and the solution. In this regard, correlation-as-twist
is also twist-as-destiny (wyrd). If the Ideal anticipates the
correlation between the solution and the problem, then
twist as correlation can also operate under the aegis of the
Ideal. Corresponding to the explicit and implicit necroses of
the soul and the Etruscan metaphysical cruelty, correlation
as twist also operates through two concurrent waves of
distortion. The explicit twist of correlation is the Idea of
ontology that is generated under the aegis of nothing qua
non-belonging or disjunctive exteriority. The implicit twist
- more insidious than the first - is the problematic interven-
tion of nothing under the shroud of the ontological medium
or the reign of the Ideal. In this sense, the Ideal becomes
a necessary excuse to transmit the intention of nothing in
the form of the problematic. Whether on the side of the
Idea of ontology or that of nothing, the problematic as twist
becomes more intricate as each side maintains its position
by conforming to the reason that either bilaterally or unilat-
erally supports it. As the problematic intertwines with
reason, it unleashes the problematizing powers inherent to
reason as a double-dealer. Once reason and the problematic
copulate, the Idea of reason comes forth as that through
which nothing can reside outside the pandemonium of
the problematic either in supporting itself or the other.

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What is at stake here is not reason as glorified tool of
disclosure or sponsor of quixotic ventures toward the
intellect, but rather the chameleon nature of reason
unmasked by the problematic. Bound to the problematic,
the animation of reason spawns writhing coils, convolu-
tions, bends and ogees - worms, ratios of putrefaction.

The Idea of survival or the persistence of the remaining
characterises the problematic both as the Idea of perforation
between the problem and the Ideal, and as the twist between
solution and problem. The Ideas of perforation and twist
are inherent to the machinery of putrefaction and decay for
which remaining less is persistence in remaining, which in
turn is insistence uponnothingin the form of the problematic.
Only through diminution or intensive decay, which binds
survival to the problematic, can the remaining be posited
as the solution to the problem of exposing Ideals. Nothing
inside the Idea or encompassed by it, can invest itself outside
of decay; putrefaction becomes the generative medium of
the Idea. In order to be revealed or effectuated, the Ideal
must not only remain in itself but must also be bound to
decay. The revelation of any truth whatsoever is conducted
through decay; but decay is the radically problematic - the
Idea. In its intensive and implicit form, decay is problematic
intimacy with nothing qua non-belonging; it is the intensive
movement of the Idea according to its ontological medium
and intention. The Idea of persistence in remaining or
persistence in general immanently points to decay as the
solution where the continuity of remaining is sponsored by
nothing; thereby, the problematic imposes itself regardless
of the objective of the ontological medium and its vitalistic
impetus. Whether the act of remaining is bound to the
intention of the Idea, the Ideal, the problem or the solution,

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the problematic is enacted. In short, regardless of what
shrinkage through remaining entails, the Idea of remaining
as such always envelops an encounter with nothing under
the heading of the problematic.

Mezentiusial Metaphysics

The fact is that every living thing among us suffers the torment
of Mezentius - that the living perish in the embrace of the dead :
and although the vital nature enjoys itself and runs things for
a while, the influence of parts nevertheless gets the upper hand
not long afterwards, and does so according to the nature of the
substance and not at all to the nature of the living one. 10

The vitalizing forces of the soul move in the direction
of two necroses, vectorially opposite but functionally
synergistic and collusive. The soul is a bicephalous necrosis.
The extensive deployment of the soul through the body is
equal to the synthesis of the Idea with that which does not
belong to it, while the intensive employment of the soul in
itself and according to the intellect is the necessary intention
of the Idea. More succinctly, the coupling of the soul with the
body is the outward and extensive activity of the Idea and
the soul in itself as the activity of the intellect is the inward
or intensive activity of the Idea. The outward activity of
the Idea is marked by contingency, yet its inward activity is
defined by necessity. Only through the two necroses can the
necessary and contingent activities of the soul or the Idea
be correlated to each other. In the same way, the creativity
of the Idea, as correlation between its contingent / extensive
and necessary / intensive activities, is only possible through
the two necroses. The first necrosis couples the Idea (X)
with that which does not belong to it (not-X) in order to

10. Francis Bacon, De VijsMortis, VI 357

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extend it beyond itself; it is caused by the profit-seeking or
economical openness of X to not-X. The second necrosis,
the persistence of the Idea or the progress in the direction
of proper perfection by virtue of imposing the primacy and
priority of nothing; it is entailed by the survival of X or
the possibility of the Idea in its temporal continuation. The
Idea in its creativity is the distance between survival and
openness. By openness we mean the extensive deployment
of the Idea according to that which does not belong to it; by
survival, the intensive employment of the Idea according
to its ontological medium or its proper objective. Whilst
establishing continuity between openness and survival,
this distance also posits a subtractive correlation between
them.

By virtue of this distance, openness and survival,
the first and the second necroses negatively reinforce
and contribute to each other. Through this distance or
subtractive space, investment in openness contributes to
survival or remaining which, simultaneously, coincides
with diminution (remaining less) and closure (remaining in
itself) . Conversely, the immersion in survival is a contribu-
tion to openness, yet it is openness in terms of that which
does not belong to the Idea (not-X) or is not the subject of
its survival. Creativity is therefore the art of ratios 11 between
openness and survival, or to be exact, between the first
and second necroses. The subtractive space or the distance
between openness and survival maintains the Idea between
two necroses; but even the two necroses have to encompass
this space to reinforce each other. The subtractive space
between openness to the body and remaining according to
the intellect is defined as the third necrosis; for it is the space
where only death can enter and death is the only outcome.

11. Here, the word 'art' is employed in its Lullian connotation

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The third necrosis of the soul or the Idea simultaneously
binds and unbinds the first and the second necroses; it is
the effectuation of correlation as subtraction or the impos-
sibility of addition. The third necrosis is the vinculum of
doom, the bond through which every contribution, every
investment and every impetus is subtractively - and not
additively - engendered. Change through subtraction,
or the mobilization of extensive and intensive vectors in
regard to each other, is the very Idea of decay.

In its gradation (step-by-step movement) between the
body, the soul and the intellect, reason aligns with three
necroses; the truth it confirms is predominantly determined
by the ternary logic of three deaths. More gravely, with
regard to the connection between reason and truth,
whatever necrosis reason invokes, the two other necroses
will join the gathering. One should not forget that the
three necroses of the soul are firmly fastened to each other
in the same way that the three necroses of the Idea are
subtractively tied together. Accordingly, for reason, there
is always a crowd of deaths. The movement of reason is
the enumeration or counting of these deaths. The first,
second and third necroses, at poles and their in-between:
'It is strange', Reason shrugs; 'all roads lead to the bosom
of the dead.'

Fig. 2 (Facing Page): Goya's Disparates plate no. 7, The 'Matrimonial' - or, according
to a trial proof, 'Disordered' - Disparate (folly, nightmare) introduces a curious
adaptation of Andrea Alciato's emblem regarding marriage by force to a corpse or
a man seared with syphilitic scabs. In Goya's depiction, the coupling of the living
with a putrid corpse is already a fiendish redundancy, for the supposed living cannot
come into being other than by being fixed upon a phantom rotting double. When
the implicit necrosis of the living is extended to the explicit necrosis of the dead, it
begets a nonhuman deformity, a quadrupedal necrosis each of whose four legs - now
two - have already been amalgamated by putrefaction.

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COLLAPSE IV

C^S,

Ajchild ren's
Coiering book

about eye care

I Can See

Jake and Dinos Chapman

Pen and ink drawings, 2008.

163

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COLLAPSE IV

Poems 1

Michel Houellebecq

1. Selected from he sens du combat (Paris: Hammarion, 1996) and La Poursuite da
Bouheur (Paris: Hammarion, 1997).

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A Life, Small

I felt old very soon after my birth;

Others struggled, desired, sighed;

I felt within myself only a vague regret.

I never had anything resembling a childhood.

Deep in some woods, on a carpet of moss,

Foetid tree trunks survive their leaves;

Around them develops an atmosphere of mourning;

Their skin filthy and black, mushrooms pushing through it.

I have never been any use for anything or to anyone;
A shame - one lives badly when one lives only for oneself.
The slightest movement constitutes a problem,
One feels unhappy and yet generic.

One is obscurely driven, like an animalcule;
Reduced almost to nothing, and yet how one suffers!
Carrying along a sort of void
Portable and petty, vaguely ridiculous.

One no longer sees death as a tragic event;
Mostly on principle, from time to time, one laughs;
One tries vainly to accede to contempt.
Then we accept all, and death does the rest.

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I love those hospitals, asylums of suffering

Where the elderly, forgotten, slowly turn into organs

Beneath the gazes, mocking and full of indifference

Of junior doctors who scratch themselves, eating bananas.

In their hygienic but nonetheless sordid rooms
You can easily divine the nothingness that stalks them
Especially when, in the morning, they sit up, livid,
And plead with a whine for their first cigarette.

The old know how to weep with a minimum of sound,
They forget thoughts and they forget gestures
They no longer laugh much, and all that remains of them
At the end of a few months, before the final phase,

Are a few phrases, almost always the same:
Thank you I am not hungry my son is coming on Sunday.
I can feel my intestines, my son will come all the same.
And the son is not there, and their hands almost white.

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So many hearts have beaten, already, upon this earth
And the little objects curled up in their cupboards
Recount the sinister and lamentable story
Of those who had no love upon this earth.

The crockery of old bachelors,

The tarnished cutlery of the war-widow

My god! And the handkerchiefs of old spinsters

The insides of cupboards, how cruel life is!

The objects all arranged and life all empty
And the evening meals, the grocers' leftovers
TV unwatched, repast without appetite.

Finally illness, making everything more sordid,
And the tired body that mingles with the earth,
The never-loved body that fades away without mystery.

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At the age of seventeen, my sister was very ugly,

In eighth grade they called her double-fatty

One November morning she jumped in the lake;

But they fished her out; the water was yellow and troubled.

Curled up under the bedspread like an great obese rat,
She dreamt of a serene and barely-conscious life
With no social relations and no hope of a screw,
But tranquil, so gentle, almost evanescent.

The next morning she perceived forms,
Light and fleeting, on the wall to her right.
She said stay with me, I must not sleep;
I see a great Jesus, in the distance, he's limping.

She said I'm a little scared, but it couldn't be any worse.
Do you think he'll come back? I'll put on a blouse.
I can see little houses, there's a whole village;
It's so lovely, down there. Is it going to hurt?

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Death is so difficult for old ladies who are too rich
Surrounded by daughters-in-law who call her "sweetie",
Pressing a silken handkerchief to their magnificent eyes,
Evaluating the paintings and the antique furniture.

I prefer the death of those old people in the tower-blocks
Who still imagine right to the end that they are loved,
Awaiting the arrival of hypothetical sons
Who will pay for a coffin in real fir.

The old, too-rich ladies end up in the cemetery,

Surrounded by cypresses and plastic shrubs

A nice promenade for sexagenarians,

The cypresses smell good and keep away the mosquitoes.

The old people in the tower-blocks end up at the crematorium,
In a little case with a white label.
The building is calm; no-one, even on Sundays,
Disturbs the sleep of the veiy old black janitor.

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Where is my subtle body? I feel the night coming on,
Pricked with needles and electric shocks
Noises come from far away into a confined space:
The rumbling city, anecdotal machine.

Tomorrow I'll go out, I'll leave my room,
I'll walk, worn-out, on a dead boulevard,
Summer women, their bodies that arch and curve
Will be renewed amidst fastidious decor.

Tomorrow there will be salades auvergiiates

In bustling cafes where managers chew;

Today is Sunday. May the splendour of God reign!

I just bought myself a rubber doll.

And I see bloody stars flying

I see punctured eyes sliding across the walls;

Mary, mother of God, protect my child!

The night clambers onto me like an unclean beast.

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At the corner of FNAC a crowd simmers

Very dense and very cruel

A huge dog chews the body of a white pigeon.

Further away in the alley

An old homeless woman curled up into a ball

Is spat on by kids without speaking a word.

I was alone, rue de Rennes. Electric signs

Directed me along vaguely erotic paths.

Hi it's Amandine.

I felt nothing in my prick.

A few yobs passed a menacing gaze

Over the rich girls and the salacious shows.

The managers consume. It is their only function.

And you were not there. I love you, Veronique.

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Nature

I have no time for those pompous imbeciles
Who go into ecstasies before bunnies' burrows
Because nature is ugly, tedious and hostile;
It has no message to transmit to humans.

How pleasant, at the wheel of a powerful Mercedes,
To drive through solitary and grandiose places;
Subtly manipulating the gearstick.
You dominate the hills, the rivers, and all things.

The forests, so close, glitter in the sun

And seem to reflect ancient knowledges;

In the depths of their valleys must lie such marvels,

After a few hours you are taken in;

Leaving the car, the irritations begin;
You stumble into the middle of a repugnant mess,
An abject universe, deprived of all meaning
Made of stones and brambles, flies and snakes.

You miss the parking-lots and the smell of petrol,
The serene, gentle glint of the nickel counters;
It's too late. It's too cold. The night begins.
The forest enfolds you in its cruel dream.

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Hypermarket - November

Firstly I stumbled into a freezer

I started to cry and I felt a little afraid.

Someone grumbled that I was spoiling the atmosphere;

To retain an air of normality I carried on.

Commuters, drained, with brutal gaze
Walked up and down slowly near the mineral water,
A rumour of the circus and of semi-vice
Mounted from the shelves. My gait was clumsy.

I collapsed at the cheese counter;
There were two old ladies carrying sardines.
The first turned and said to her neighbour:
"It's really sad, though, a boy of that age."

And then I saw very broad, circumspect feet;
There was a salesman who took measurements.
Many seemed surprised by my new shoes;
For the last time I was a little on the margins.

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End of the Evening

At the end of the evening, the rise of despair is an inevitable
phenomenon. There is a kind of timetable of horror. Well,
I don't know; I think so.

The expansion of the internal void. That's what it is.
A taking-flight of every possible event. As if you were
suspended in the void, equidistant from every real action,
by monstrously powerful magnetic forces.

Thus suspended, incapable of any concrete grip on the
world, the night can seem so long to you. And, indeed, it
will be.

It will be, however, a protected night; but you will not
appreciate this protection. You will only appreciate it later,
once you return to the city, once you return to the day, once
you return to the world.

Around nine'o'clock, the world will already have attained
its full level of activity. It will turn smoothly with a gentle
whirring. You will have to take part in it, to jump in - a little
as if one jumped onto the footplate of a shuddering train
ready to leave the station.

You don't make it. Once more, you await the night - which,
however, once more, will bring you exhaustion, uncertainty
and horror.

And this will happen again, every day, until the end of the
world.

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The Shadow of a Puppet Dance:
Metzinger, Ligotti and the Illusion of
Selfhood

James Trafford

"There are no people, nothing at all like that.
Thomas Ligotti

No such things as selves exist in the world:
Nobody ever was or had a self.
Thomas Metzinger

I. Being No-One

In his Being No-One, 1 Thomas Metzinger sets out a
radical challenge to any philosophical defence of the status
of subjective self-consciousness against the incursions of
reductive neuroscience. Deploying all the resources of a
nascent science of consciousness, Metzinger proposes at a
stroke to eliminate selves from the ontological horizon and
to destroy our most cherished 'originary' intuitions about
'ourselves' and our place in the world. Such intuitions

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furnish the precondition for the phenomenological
description of the world that distinguishes between natural,
manifest appearances and the supervening artifices of
theoretical knowledge. By staking out a supposedly 'unob-
jectifiable' domain of subjectivity philosophy has sought
to maintain its distance from the coruscating potency of
neuroscience. Husserl's so-called 'principle of all principles'
provides perhaps the most radical expression of this kind
of philosophical presupposition: 'that every originary
presentive intuition is a legitimising source of cognition,
that everything originarily offered to us in "intuition" is
to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but
also only within the limits in which it is presented'. 2 But it
is precisely the legitimacy of such 'pre-theoretical' intuitions
that Metzinger problematises, on the grounds that even
appearances themselves are never immediately 'manifest'
to the conscious subject who experiences them. Working
across several levels of explanation, Metzinger is not only
able to draw out a tractable science of consciousness, but to
expose consciousness' 'naive realism' about its own states.

Despite formidable technical complexity, the upshot
of Metzinger's analyses could not be more clear: 'no such
things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had
a self'. 3 Consequently, 'consciousness is only appearance'. 4

1. T. Metzinger, BcingNo One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (London: MIT Press,
2004).

2. E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy,
First Book: General 'Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten. (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 44. This is concurrent with Husserl's call to get 'back to
the things themselves, questioning them in their self-givenness, and laying aside all
prejudices alien to them.' (Husserl, Ideas! section 19)

3. Metzinger, Being No One, 1.

4. T Metzinger, 'Appearance is Not Knowledge: The Incoherent Strawman, Content-

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According to Metzinger, organisms are not selves; rather,
they possess 'self-models' which cannot be recognised by
the system that employs them. All that exist are specific
information processing systems engaged in self-modelling,
but whose models cannot be correlated with any ostensibly
'real' items in the world. Metzinger thereby eliminates
substantive subjectivity in favour not of reduction as such,
but of tractable explanation. Rather than reducing the
self, he uses the scientific resources at his command to
produce a functional model of what 'selves' must be: 'The
phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process - and the
subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious
information processing system operates under a transparent
self-model.' 5

Expanding upon Wilfred Sellar's attack on the 'Myth of
the Given' - 'the idea that some of our beliefs or claims have
a privileged epistemic status because the facts that make
them true are "given" to us by experience' 6 - Metzinger
claims that our folk-philosophical intuitions are a direct
result of the bounds of our cognition, as expressed in the
limitations of our phenomenal state-space. He illustrates
this with a naturalist substantiation of Plato's allegory of
the cave, predicated on the argument that 'our phenomenal
model of reality is an internal model of reality that could,
at any time, in principle, turn out to be quite far removed
from a much more high-dimensional physical reality

Content Confusions and Mindless Conscious Subjects', Journal of Consciousness Studies
11:1 (2004), 67-71.

5. T. Metzinger, 'Response to "A Self Worth Having": A Talk With Nicholas
Humphrey', at http://www.edge.Org/discourse/self.html#metzinger (2003).

6. S. Stich, Deconstructing the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 118.

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COLLAPSE IV

than we have ever thought of'. 7 The 'cave' is the physical
organism; the shadows, a 'low-dimensional projection of a
higher dimensional object'; the fire is neural dynamics, i.e.
the 'self-regulating flow of neural information processing' ;
the wall is the space of phenomenology, though the wall and
fire are not separate entities. In sum, '[t]he cave in which we
live our conscious life is formed by our global, phenomenal
model of reality' 8 In line with some of the bolder suggestions
proposed by contemporary physicists, 9 then, Metzinger's
analogy proposes that phenomenological perception may
well be imprisoned within a virtual model, in which an
experienced object is merely a 'low-dimensional shadow of
the actual physical object in your hands, a dancing shadow
in your central nervous system'. 10 The crucial and far-
reaching difference from Plato's cave, however, is that this
illusion is, quite literally, no-one's illusion: 'there is no-one
in the cave [...] The cave shadow is there. The cave itself is
empty' 11

In the following, we will use speculative theses implied
by Thomas Ligotti's suffocating, hallucinogenic horror 12 to

7. Metzingcr, BeingNo One, 548.

8. Ibid., 546.

9. See, for example, the postulation of extra dimensions of space-time in superstring
theory, about which physicist Brian Greene writes that: 'the discovery of extra
dimensions would show that the entirety of human experience had left us completely
unaware of a basic and essential aspect of the universe. It would forcefully argue that
even those features of the cosmos that we have thought to be readily accessible to
human senses need not be' (B. Greene, The Elegant Universe: Space, Time and the Texture
of Reality (London: Penguin Science, 2005), 19.

10. Metzinger, BeingNo One, 548-9.

1 l.Ibid., 549-50.

12. Very briefly, Ligotti's horror is characterised by a claustrophobic discrepancy
between realism and oneirism, in which the world is illusional. and the real inconsistent

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draw out some of the ramifications of Metzinger's theses.
Our fundamental contention is that, just as the expropriation
of subjectivity which is the fundamental theme of Ligotti's
fiction finds an unexpected realist basis in Metzinger's phil-
osophical naturalism, so, conversely, Ligotti's own meta-
physical 'irrealism' affords resources through which the
'unimaginable' consequences of Metzinger's naturalistic
'nemocentrism' can be brought into speculative focus. 13

II. Phenomenology and the Fiction of Experience

Metzinger argues that neuroscience circumvents the
supposedly irreducible ambit of self-consciousness and
dissolves self-intimacy through the objectivation of the
mechanisms of subjectivity. It is the non-intuitability of
these mechanisms themselves that gives rise to qualitative
experience - an experience which is thus constituted by its
very inability to access the impersonal mechanisms which
make the phenomenal simulation of self possible. This
phenomenal simulation is transparent to experience: 'we do

and autonomous. Hence, Ligotti inverts the very possibility of redemption: The
close-ness of world is disclosed in grotesque fabulation to be utterly autonomous in
exactly the same moment as it is revealed that the mind is equally autonomous from
the normative phenomenal experience of man. See, for example, T. Ligotti, Crampton
(Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2002) ; T. Ligotti, 'I Have a Special Plan For This
World' in Teatro Grotesm (London: Random House, 2008); T Ligotti, 'Mad Night of
Atonement' in Noctuary (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1994); T Ligotti, 'The Tsalal'
in Noctuary (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1994); and T Ligotti, The Sect of the Idiot'
in Songs of a Dead Dreamer (London: Robinson Publishing, 1989).

13. A nemocentric reality model is one that satisfies a sufficiently rich set of
constraints for conscious experience [...] while at the same time not exemplifying
phenomenal selfhood. It may be functionally egocentric, but it is phenomenologically
selfless. It would, while still being a functionally centred representational structure,
not be accompanied by the phenomenal experience of being someoiwl (Metzinger,
Being No One, 336). Nemocentricism, for Metzinger, is a phenomenologically
unimaginable possibility; however, it is a possibility that is perfectly conceivable and
neurobiologically possible (see Metzinger, BeingNo One, op.cit.).

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not experience phenomenal states as phenomenal states
[...] [we] look through them'. 1 * Metzinger regularly alludes
to fully immersive virtual reality to illustrate his thesis:
'We do not experience our conscious field as a cyberspace
generated by our brain, but simply as reality itself, with
which we are in contact in a natural and unproblematic
way' 15 Folk psychology's agenda is driven by a first person
logic, occupying a perspectival and geometric structure that
is temporally and spatially individuated. 16 This first-person
perspective, however, is simply the phenomenal self-model,
which Metzinger considers amenable to a neurobiological
description, most likely involving parallel distributed
processing (pdp), and a functional description: 'the
phenomenal self-model is a plastic, multimodal structure'. 17

First-person phenomenal experience is thus formulated
as an empirical ideality, an empty fiction that is plastic,
and therefore highly dependent upon the idiosyncrasies
of the species. Effectively, the first-person perspective is
a generation of worldhood, 'a phenomenal cosmology'. 18
The layers of simulation that coalesce into phenomenal
experience encapsulate the intuition of phenomenal

14. T. Metzinger, 'The Problem of Consciousness' in Conscious Experience* ed. T.
Metzinger {Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic, 1995) 11.

15. Ibid, 11.

16. Folk psychology attributes a unique and direct causal link from a selection
process for volition as the cause of behaviour. Metzinger takes this causal link to be
untenable, so that; 'it is not only that folk psychology is false - it is the content of the
conscious self-model that attributes a causal relation between two events represented
within it' (Metzinger, BeingNo One, 360). Folk psychology is therefore both false and
hallucinatory from a scientific, third person account.

17. T. Metzinger and B. Walde, 'Commentary on Jakab's "Ineffability of Qualia",
Consciousness and Cognition 9 (2000), 352-62.

18. Metzinger, 'The Problem of Consciousness', 6.

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cosmology which, from the third person perspective, is
understood to be a representational and functional property
which can be analysed in its entirety on this basis. 19 'Selves'
in the full-blooded ontological sense, then, fall victim to
Ockham's razor:

Under a general principle of ontological parsimony, it is not
necessary (or rational) to assume the existence of selves,
because as theoretical entities they fulfil no indispensable
explanatory function [...] All that can be explained by the
phenomenological notion of a 'self can also be explained using
the representationalist notion of a transparent se\£-mode!. 20

Even the most elementary components of phenome-
nality are unavailable to the self. For example, Metzinger
argues that, in order to draw logical concepts from
phenomenal content, and therefore to have epistemic and
justified belief with regard to simple forms of phenomenal
content, transtemporal identity criteria would have to be
assumed, drawn directly from material identity criteria. 21
In that case, the abstraction of logic or ontology from
experience would necessitate the indubitability of the self-
manifestation of appearances: 'letting apparition show
itself m. its appearance according to its appearance'. 22 Thus,
phenomenological appearance is rooted in an originary
field of self-identity which, removing the imposition of

19. See Metzinger, Being No One, 577. However, Metzinger suggests that this might
not be a rational choice in all contexts, drawing a clear distinction between his work
and the Churchlands'.

20. Ibid.

21. For a phenomenological account in which this is indeed assumed to be the case,
seeJ-L. Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology ofGivenness, trans. J. Kosky (Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002) 7ff.

22. Ibid., 8.

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the conceptual a priori, claims to return 'things' to lived
experience, and to the fleshly actuality of consciousness.
According to Metzinger, we only assume the reliability of
this primitive self-identity on the assumption that 'in our
subjective experience of sensory sameness we carry out a
phenomenal representation of this transtemporal identity
on the object level in an automatic manner, which already
carries its epistemic justification in itself.' - and '[i]t is
precisely this background assumption which is false'. 23 The
transtemporal criteria necessary for the subjective individu-
ation and consequent logical identity are simply unavailable
to subjective introspection, so that phenomenal concepts are
a priori incapable of being introspectively formed. Phenom-
enological primitives, supposedly straightforwardly given
to the conscious subject, are incapable of providing even
the most basic conceptual traction on the data of conscious-
ness. Hence, as Metzinger argues:

The phenomenological approach in philosophy of mind, at
least with regard to those simple forms of phenomenal content,
is due to failure; a descriptive psychology cannot come into
existence with regard to almost all of the most simple forms of
phenomenal content [...] The neural and functional correlates
of the corresponding phenomenal states can, in principle,
provide us with transtemporal identity criteria as well as
with those logical identity criteria for which we have been
looking. Neurophenomenology is possible; phenomenology is
impossible. 24

Only through the objective scientific circumvention of
self-conscious experience is it possible to gain traction on

23. Metzinger, Being No One, 82.

24. Metzinger, 'Commentary on Jakab's "Ineffability of Qualia"'.

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the specific reality of both the manifest and non-manifest
elements of phenomenal consciousness.

III. Transparency: A special form of darkness

The phenomenal self comes about through a 'special
form of epistemic darkness' - essentially, the inability of
the subject to represent the conditions of its own intuitions.
Folk psychology posits that the world is given immediately
to subjective consciousness; it assumes that the experience
of phenomenal content is transparent to the self. Metzinger
argues, on the contrary, that immediacy is an illusory
experience of the 'outside' world:

From an epistemological perspective, we see that our
phenomenal states at no point in time establish a direct
and immediate contact with the world for us [...] However,
on the level of phenomenal representation [...] this fact is
systematically suppressed. 25

In a direct inversion of the traditional notion of the trans-
parency of inner sense, Metzinger argues that transparency,
as an essential characteristic of phenomenal experience,
illuminates the phenomenological fallacy of pure experience
and the 'subjective impression of immediacy'. Naive realism
is not, therefore, a philosophical theory as such; it is the
global character of intuition, once the latter is understood
in terms of phenomenal content locally supervening on
neurobiological properties. Opacity, as opposed to transpar-
ency, occurs when appearances are cognised as appearances.
Hence, our primitive pre-reflective feeling of conscious
selfhood is never truthful, in that it does not correspond
to any single entity inside or outside of the self-representing

25. Metzinger, Being No-One, 59.

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system. 26 The culmination of this inversion of the concept
of transparency is indicated by the fact that transparency
is a form of darkness: 'With regard to the phenomenology
of visual experience transparency means that we are not
able to see something, because it is transparent. We don't
see the window but only the bird flying by. Phenomenal
transparency in general, however, means that something
particular is not accessible to subjective experience, namely,
the representational character of the contents of conscious
experience.' 27 The immediately given contents of the
Phenomenal Self-Model (psm) correspond neither to the
sub-personal mechanisms underlying those contents, nor to
any kind of external reality; the entire life-world is illusory,
an 'online hallucination'. 28 Metzinger calls this feature of the
self-model theory (smt) 'autoepistemic closure' - that is, the
closure and boundedness of processing in regard to internal
dynamics. Autoepistemic closure allows for the availability
of phenomenal content but not of the vehicle of content. 29

26. Sec ibid., 565.

27. Ibid., 169. Metzinger elucidates this point: 'We do not have the feeling of living in
a three-dimensional film or in an inner representational space: in standard situations
our conscious life always takes place in the world. We do not experience our conscious
field as a cyberspace generated by our brain, but simply as reality itself, with which
we are in contact in a natural and unproblematic way. In standard situations the
contents of pure experience are subjectively given in a direct and seemingly
immediate manner. It is precisely in this sense that we can say: they are infinitely
close to us.' (Metzinger, 'The Problem of Consciousness' , 11-2).

28. See Metzinger, Being No-One, 51. As Metzinger puts it: 'The instruments of
representation themselves cannot be represented as such anymore, and hence the
experiencing system, by necessity, is entangled in a naive realism.' {Ibid., 169).

29. The dualism of vehicle and content is not available for Metzinger; they cannot
be understood as two distinct entities (sec Metzinger, Being No-One, 166). More
specifically then, transparency results from the: 'attentional unavailability of
earlier processing stages in the brain for introspection. Transparency results from a
structural / architectonic property of the neural information-processing going on in
our brains' (T. Metzinger, 'Phenomenal Transparency and Cognitive Self-Reference',

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However, as Metzinger is unwilling to split vehicle from
content - which he believes would reify abstract content
- transparency is further complexified by the assumption
that there is a processual and physically realised embodied
content. 30 Metzinger therefore effectively lays waste to func-
tionalism's attempt to abstract the cognitive from actual
physiological processes, an attempt which arguably already
concedes the irreducible status of human sapience vis-a-vis
its empirical substrate.

This, of course, is a characteristically modern philosoph-
ical distinction - the same one that allows Kant to maintain
the autonomy of the transcendental subject from any
empirical intervention or knowledge whatsoever. Through
the Critique of "Pure Reason's so-called 'paradox of inner sense',
Kant is able to maintain the transcendental status of the
'I think' without lapsing into pure idealism, which would
necessarily conflate inner sense with consciousness. 31
Inner and outer sense are given in empirical perception as
an intuitive whole, which is ultimately determined by the
understanding through the transcendental synthesis of pure
apperception. 32 Therefore, the intuitive unity of subjective
consciousness remains distinct from the transcendental

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2 (2003), 353-93.

30. Hence, phenomenal transparency is distinguished from a Cartesian epistemic
transparency; 'The Cartesian claim about the epistemic transparency of self-
consciousness can itself not be epistemically justified.' (Metzinger, Being No-One, 167),
though it is phenomenologically adequate (see Metzinger, Being No-One, 340).

31. This is key to Kant's critique of idealism and of the Cartesian subject; that they
conflate inner sense with the conscious self.

32. Kant argues that: 'What determines inner sense is the understanding and its
originary power of combining the manifold of intuition, that is, of bringing it under
an apperception.' I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Meiklejohn, ed. V. Politis
(London: Everyman, 1993), 111 (B153).

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COLLAPSE IV

unity of apperception, the 'I think', that unifies the manifold
of presentations into an object of experience.

Metzinger concurs with Kant on the futile nature of
rational psychology, and similarly on his transcendental
(rather than ontological) distinction between phenomenal
content and reality. However, this transcendental opacity,
for Kant, lies in the fact that there can be no transparent
knowledge of the self - concomitant with which is the
dissolution of the substantive self through the positing of a
formal a priori ground of subjectivity. Hence, whilst Kant's
concept of 'transcendental illusion' certainly corresponds
with what Metzinger terms 'phenomenological illusion'
- that is, the drawing of epistemic conclusions from
phenomenal experience -- ultimately, Kant's positing of a
noumenal subjectivity commits the same fallacy that he had
sworn to abjure. For, if Metzinger is correct, then the psm
undermines any attempt to transcendentalise subjectivity
or consciousness, and the putatively noumenal substratum
of inner sense can be cashed out in its entirety from within
the ambit of scientific objectivity. Kant presupposed the
unification of sense to be given through the unity of apper-
ception that acts as the transcendental guarantor for the
nomological consistency of appearances, and thus specifies
ideal laws of appearance that have subsequently been shown
to be rooted in empirical intuition. Metzinger disavows the
role of syntactical invariance through his insistence on
the sub-symbolic and immanent objectivity of the non-
manifest element of consciousness. 33 The self-model is a

33. As Metzinger explicates: 'the presence and striking holism of phenomenal reality
[...] would no longer have to be explained in accordance with classical philosophical
models from above (e.g. by a transcendental subject), if we had a good bottom-up
alternative [...] called "feature binding" in the terminology of brain research: The
fusion of different properties perceived by the system into a holistic internal structure.

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plastic structure which can be neurobiologically described
as a complex neural activation pattern. But furthermore,
'[o]n a more abstract level the same pattern of physiolog-
ical activity can also be described as a complex functional
state'. 34 Since appearances are not discursively structured
for Metzinger, he eradicates the autonomy of nomological
consistency by rooting the manifestation of appearances in
physical structures that are in no way dependent upon ideal
(transcendental) laws.

Metzinger thus inverts Kantian 'opacity', arguing that it
is not the transcendental opacity of the self that is primary,
but the transparency of the self-model, which, through its
objectivation, canbecome opaque, allowingfor the cognising
of appearances as appearances. It is our functional design
that forces us into a naive realism, so that the explanation
for semantic transparency is given by an evolutionary,
rather than a transcendental, account: 'for biological
systems like ourselves - who always had to minimise the
computational load [...] naive realism was a functionally
adequate "background assumption" to achieve reproduc-
tive success [...] [there was] no evolutionary pressure on our
representational architecture to overcome the naive realism
inherent in semantic transparency'. 35

Such a binding of properties is, for instance, necessary in enabling us to see objects
as objects' {Metzinger, 'Faster than Thought: Holism, Homogeneity and Temporal
Coding' in Conscious Experience, ed. T Metzinger {Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic,
1995), 435.

34. T. Metzinger, The Subjectivity of Subjective Experience: A Representationalist
Analysis of the First-Person Perspective' in Neural Correlates of Comciousness: Empirical
and Conceptual Questions, ed. T Metzinger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 289.

35. Metzinger, The Subjectivity of Subjective Experience, 299.

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COLLAPSE IV

IV. The Immanent Objectivation of Consciousness

Kant safeguards the autonomy of philosophy via
recourse to a notion of an a priori transcendental subjec-
tivity which would circumscribe possible experience,
rendering empirical science inherently incapable of investi-
gating the objectivity of the object and the formal conditions
of empirical actuality. And, whether overtly or not, much
'continental philosophy' remains wedded to the presuppo-
sition that science is supervenient on a set of concepts that
are ideally embedded in the subject. This disjunction of
the empirical sciences and philosophy arguably attains its
most extreme formulation in Husserl's conception of pure
phenomenology as a transcendental-eidetic science whose
bracketing of the world ensures that the natural sciences
are confined to res externa, thereby preserving an immanent
plane of pure experience governed by an irreducible tran-
scendental consciousness: 'the existence of Nature cannot
be the condition for the existence of consciousness, since
Nature itself turns out to be a correlate of consciousness:
Nature is only as being constituted in regular concatenations
of consciousness'. 36 However, according to Metzinger, it is
the very domain of pre-theoretical access which, despite all
claims to the contrary, is ultimately tethered to the myopia
of contingently - evolutionarily - circumscribed conditions
of intuition. Phenomenology, rather than reaching into 'the

36. E. Husserl, Ideas, Book 1, 116. See also Husserl's account of phenomenology
as an eidetic science: 'phenomenological or pure psychology as an intrinsically
primary and completely self-contained psychological discipline, which is also sharply
separated from natural science, is, for very fundamental reasons, not to be established
as an empirical science but rather as a purely rational ("apriori," "eidetic") science. As
such it is the necessary foundation for any rigorous empirical science dealing with
the laws of the psychic, quite the same way that the purely rational disciplines of
nature pure geometry, kinematics, chronology, mechanics are the foundation for every
possible "exact" empirical science of nature' {Husserl, 'Phenomenology: Entry for tire
Encyclopedia Britannica' Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 2, 1971: 77-90.

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things themselves', succeeds only in transcendentalising
folk psychology. In the wake of Metzinger, consciousness
must be conceived of as produced by immanent objective
mechanisms, which are themselves sub-symbolic, non-
linguistic, and unconscious, so that 'pure self-reflection' is
exposed as caught within the obscurantism of an empirico-
transcendental circularity.

Metzinger argues that where philosophy has long
grappled with reason and representation, it is only now
that representation has 'through its semantic coupling with
the concept of information, been transposed to the domain
of mathematical precision and subsequently achieved
empirical anchorage'. 37 Thus, '[conceptual progress by
a combination of philosophy and empirical research
programs is possible; conceptual progress by introspec-
tion alone is impossible in principle'. 38 Metzinger's work
constantly forces philosophy to take account of objective
intelligence; the sub-personal production of phenomenality
as a naturalised Kantianism. The objective structure of
knowledge is invested with empirical contingency, as one
among many objective procedures; man as a mass of info-
theoretic computation packed densely through sedimented
layers of transcendental deception.

V. Nemocentrism

Perhaps one of the most intriguing undercurrents of
Metzinger's book, albeit one that he does not expand upon,
is the implicit suggestion that the interests of thought can
be unbound from lived experience, and in many cases even

37. Metzinger, Being M One, 19.

38. Ibid., 83.

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opposed to the interests of life. 39 For example, in a general
discussion of scientific realism, Metzinger writes that
'there are aspects of the scientific world-view which may
be damaging to our mental well-being'. 40 The object 'man'
consists of tightly packed layers of simulation, for which
naive realism becomes a necessary prophylactic in order to
ward off the terror concomitant with the destruction of our
intuitions regarding ourselves and our status in the world:
'conscious subjectivity is the case in which a single organism
has learned to enslave itself} 1 It is at this point that Thomas
Ligotti's work can illuminate Metzinger's thesis, offering
a phenomenological purchase upon that which Metzinger
has claimed to be impossible for the imagination - method-
ological nemocentrism.

Ligotti invokes the expropriation of subjective
experience thus: 'There are no people, nothing at all like
that, the human phenomenon is but the sum of densely
coiled layers of illusion, each of which winds itself upon
the supreme insanity that there are persons of any kind.' 42
Ligotti couples this supreme insanity with a metaphysical
irrealism regarding the substantive nature of the world. The
supposedly foundational order of the phenomenal world is

39. This is consistent with our general critique of phenomenology, following
Derrida's characterisation of Husserl's work as 'a philosophy of life [. ..] because
the source of sense in general is always determined as an act of living, as an act of
a living being, as Lebendigkeit {[. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on
Husserl's Theory of Signs {Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973) 10). On
this divorce between the interests of thought and those of life, see Ray Brassier's Nihil
Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).

40. Metzinger, 'Response to "A Self Worth Having"'.

41. Metzinger, Being No One, 558. The self is mere appearance; 'the conscious self
is an illusion which is no-one's illusion' {Metzinger, 'The Subjectivity of Subjective
Experience' 2000).

42. Ligotti, 'I Have a Special Plan for this World'.

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a mere semblance - and not a semblance of a supra-terres-
trial realm, or an alien 'Other', but a semblance of the real
world, which is utterly indifferent to the interests of organic
life and thought. Ligotti thus unfolds some of the existential
and phenomenological implications of Metzinger's concep-
tualisation of the relative autonomy of appearances: His
characters experience reality in a way that is utterly incom-
mensurate with the phenomenological register of human
perception.

Ligotti's work is characterised by two movements which
he refuses to separate: the subject's passive dispossession
of self-consciousness, and the 'enlightenment of inanity'.
This double movement unmasks the reality within which
the characters have always been. The suffocating effect
Ligotti achieves through this process is intensified by his
staunch repudiation of any recourse to the supernatural;
there is no possibility of escape. Hence, the ascecis of the
personal takes place within a positively insignificant reality,
a realisation which dissolves both the intimacy of subjective
experience, and the impersonal distance of the mechanics
of that experience.

Ligotti's phenomenological nemocentrism draws out
this collapse of any securely demarcated ontological and
epistemological foundations in a weird-fictional landscape
filled with the ruins and ghosts of puppets. Throughout
Ligotti's work, the puppet figures as the insensate and
sub-personal reality hidden beneath the 'mindless mirrors'
of our naive reality. Puppets function as 'conduits to the
unreal', 43 through whose agency hallucinatory phenom-
enality bleeds into a simultaneous concretisation of the

43. ST. Joshi, 'Thomas Ligotti: Escape From Life', in The Thomas Ligotti Reader, ed.
D. Schweitzer (Evanston, MD: Wildside Press, 2003) 135.

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oneiric. Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an
endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware
that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose
mechanisms they know nothing, and over which they have
no control. As Dziemianowicz notes in relation to Ligotti's
'Dreams of a Mannikin', the puppet's overriding affect is a
suspicion that 'he and his entire world are merely a fictional
diversion'. 44 The puppet is not merely an mocking parody
of man, it is the unmasking of the animate face of insensate
reality, the unveiling of the inexorable mechanics of the
personal; 'There are no means for escaping this world. It
penetrates even into your sleep and is its substance. You
are caught in your own dreaming where there is no space.
And are held forever where there is no time. You can
do nothing you are not told to do. There is no hope for
escape from this dream that was never yours. The very
words you speak are only its very words.' 45 The irrepress-
ible horror concomitant with Ligotti's concretisation of
the oneiric stems from the experience of living in a 'three-
dimensional film', a 'tunnel through an inconceivably
high-dimensional reality'. 46 This phenomenal experience of
nemocentrism ultimately dissolves both the intimacy of the
personal and the distance of the impersonal; 'nothing's too
small, nothing's too big. You lose your car keys, your wife
gets run over by a semi, some nut blows up the capital of
Pakistan'. 47 For this reason, the concretisation of the puppet

44. S. Dziemianowicz, 'Nothing Is What It Seems To Be 1 , in Tlie Thomas Ligotti Reader,
ed. D. Schweitzer (Evanston, MD: Wildside Press, 2003), 50. See T. Ligotti, 'Dreams
of a Mannikin', in Songs of a Dead Dreamer.

45. Ligotti, I Have a Special Plan for this World".

46. Metzinger, BeingNo One, 551.

47. Ligotti, Crampton, 82.

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Trafford - Shadow of a Puppet Dance

concomitant with the increasing passivity of the narrator
engenders an affect of universal claustrophobia through the
implosion of the personal - which was, of course, never
personal to begin with.

It is resolutely not the case, however, that the puppet-
world is 'willed' into existence by an 'Other'; there is no
puppet master pulling the strings. 48 Ligotti's systematic
assault on empirical realism is not a result of the reinvigo ra-
tion of the world with a Heraclitean flux, a pure produc-
tivity, or a contingent excess of materiality. Ligotti's real
is 'positively' senseless, rigorously disabling any attempt
to provide reality with substantive or ideal foundations by
irreversibly severing its reciprocity with the pretensions
of subjective thought. Ligotti can no more assume the
existence of an extant and hypostatised nature than he can
assume the necessaiy constancy of presence. The transcen-
dental illusion exposed by Metzinger is expanded into a
total disparity between the interests of life and the reality
that life finds itself within. The secure foundations of the
phenomenal and the real dissolve, not into a universal
solipsism, but into a rigorous realism; 'it is not, in the end,
a replacement of the real world by the unreal, but a sort of
turning the real world inside out to show that it was unreal
all along'. 49

48. As Ligotti consistently maintains, the dissolution of the self cannot give way to a
Schopenhaurian Will, as this reinstates some form of 'first philosophy' in the form of
an underlying essence. See Ligotti, 'Tsalal'; 'You wrote that there is not true growth
or evolution in the life of this world but only transformations of appearance, an
incessant melting and molding of surfaces without underlying essence. Above all you
pronounced that there is no salvation of any being because no beings exist as such,
nothing exists to be saved - everything, everyone exists only to be drawn into the
slow and endless swirling of mutations that we may see every second of our lives'.

49. Joshi, 'Thomas Ligotti', 139. Hence the statement; 'Nothing is real' (Ligotti,
GramptoTL, 83), is not assumable under the idealising consequences of phenomenal
immediacy.

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COLLAPSE IV

Where Metzinger definitively resolves to destroy
the possibility of the synthesis of man and nature, it is
through Ligotti's phenomenological nationalisation that
the affective ramifications of this move are elucidated.
Ligotti has developed a method of realising the absolute
indifference of the real to the human and the personal
through a metaphysical irrealism in which he disentangles
appearances from both sufficient reason and originary
manifestation by severing the nomological isomorphism of
appearances and their substrate; in the end, subjectivity is
simply a specific exacerbation of objectivity 50 Accordingly,
an unforeseen consequence of Ligotti's inhabitation of
Metzinger's epistemic nemocentricism is that Metzinger's
naturalistic realism ends up providing traction on Ligotti's
metaphysical irrealism: 'The horror and nothingness of
human existence - the cosy facade behind which was only a
spinning abyss.' 51 Phenomenal cosmology is not given by a
structural syntax, but is simply an exacerbation of objective
processes unconstrained by any form of ideality.

50. The dissolution of apodictic realism is continuous with the dissolution of apodictic
thought; 'the integrity of material forms is only a prejudice, at most a point of view
[...] things are not bolted down, so to speak. And no more is that thing which we call
the mind' (T. Ligotti, 'The Cocoons' in Tlie Sluidow at the Bottom of tlie World [NY:
Cold Spring Press, 2005], 164).

51. T Ligotti, Conspiracy Against tlie Human Race {Forthcoming - see extract in
present volume). This would entail the extraction of metaphysical naturalism from
naturalistic realism, which is methodological rather than ontological. Accordingly,
it is possible that naturalism may not be the most promising explanatory ground
for Metzinger's self-model theory, as evolutionary ethology can be shown to
ground a representational efficacy, but in order to extrapolate scientific realism on
this basis, Metzinger would have to argue that nature is inherently functional, and
therefore promoting a functional univocity. In this case, Metzinger would succumb
to the charges that StephenJ. Gould poses to Daniel Dennett: making 'thinly veiled
attempts to smuggle purpose back into biology' (S.J. Gould, The Richness of Life: A
Stephen Jay Gould Reader [London: Vintage, 2007], 442). See D. Dennett, Darwin's
Dangerous Idea: Evolution and tlie Meanings of Life (London: Penguin, 1996) .

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Ligotti's horror, then, can be understood in terms of
Metzinger's theory, in such a way as to grasp Ligotti's
work as a fictional realisation of Metzinger's nemocen-
trism. Ligotti's horror is removed from the realm of the
fantastic and given naturalistic traction through Metzinger's
definition of man as the 'puppet shadow [that] dances on the
wall of the neurophenomenological caveman's phenomenal
state space'. 52 Equally, reading Metzinger alongside Ligotti,
or as Ligottian theory-horror, accentuates the anomic
terror of the arrogation of the self, as the folk psycholog-
ical ascription of agency that is preserved in the artifice
of natural language is extricated from the transcendental
pretensions that phenomenology underwrites.

Finally, Ligotti enables us to recognise that the theoretic-
practical resolve of Metzinger's theory is to be found not
in the reduction of folk psychology, but in a kind of neuro-
technology. Phenomenality and knowledge-weighting
are malleable: 'the phenomenal self-model is a plastic,
multimodal structure' 53 whose 'insertion and integration
into other domains of information architecture amplify
the potential for cognitive pliability'. 54 What is this but the
naturalisation of the final outcome of Ligotti's fantastical
puppet-dance: the realisation that underlying our parochial
self-conceit is the impersonal reality of the meat-puppet? 55

52. Metzinger, BeingNo One, 558.

53. Metzinger, 'The Subjectivity of Subjective Experience' 289.

54. See Metzinger; 'change the representational content of the conscious self-model
[...] get some unconscious microfunctional output' (Metzinger, 'Response to "A Self
Worth Having'").

55. The conjunction of Ligotti and Metzinger induces the definition of man
as the shadow of a 'meat-puppet'. For a reading of man as a meat-puppet within
contemporary science, see R. Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of
tlie Life Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 36; see also its fictional
realisation in the character of Molly in W. Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Voyager,
1984).

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COLLAPSE IV

Here the objectivation of the world indicates its raz/condition,
unveiling the inexorable mechanics of appearances as a
prospect of hideous insanity - a hall of mindless mirrors
unbound from the densely coiled layers of illusion that
characterise the interests of life and the physiology of
thought. Meanwhile, cognitive protectionism and organic
enslavement ensure the oneiric aphasia of the shadow of
the puppet dance:

To know, to understand in the fullest sense, is to plunge into
an enlightenment of inanity, a wintry landscape of memory
whose substance is all shadows and a profound awareness
of the infinite spaces surrounding us on all sides. Within this
space we remain suspended only with the aid of strings that
quiver with our hopes and our horrors, and which keep us
dangling over the gray void. How is it that we can defend such
puppetry, condemning any efforts to strip us of these strings?
Hie reason, one must suppose, is that nothing is more enticing,
nothing more vitally idiotic, than our desire to have a name
- even if it is the name of a stupid little puppet - and to hold
on to this name throughout the long ordeal of our lives, as if
we could hold on to it forever. If only we could keep those
precious strings from growing frayed and tangled, if only we
could keep from falling into an empty sky, we might continue
to pass ourselves off under our assumed names and perpetuate
our puppet's dance throughout all eternity. 56

56. T. Ligotti, 'A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing 1 in In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
(London: Durtro, 1997).

206 207

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'Memento Mori' - Dead Monkeys

Oleg Kulik

12 b/w photographs, 1998.

Courtesy of XL Gallery, Moscow.

208

COLLAPSE IV

Thinking Horror 1

Thomas Ligotti

Beginnings

For ages they had been without heads. Headless they
lived, and headless they died. How long they had thus
flourished none of them knew. Then something began to
change. It happened over unremembered generations. The
signs of a transfiguring were being writ ever more deeply into
them. As their breed moved forward, they began crossing
boundaries whose very existence they never suspected ...
and they trembled. Some of them eyed their surroundings
as they would a strange land into which they had wandered,
even though their kind had trodden the same earth for
countless seasons. And after nightfall, they looked up at
a sky filled with stars and felt themselves small and fragile
in the vastness. More and more, they came to know a new

1. The present text is an extract from 'The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Short
Life of Horror (forthcoming), a work which binds together themes from pessimistic
philosophy and the horror genre into an exposition on the uncanny nature and
ontological fraudulence of the human species.

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COLLAPSE IV

way of being. It was as if the objects around them were
one thing and they were another. The world was moving
farther and farther away and they were at the center of this
movement. Another world was forming inside the heads
they now had. Each of them, in time, became frightened
in a way they had never known. In former days, they were
frightened only by sights and sounds in the moments they
saw or heard them. Now they were frightened by things
that were not present to their senses. They were also
frightened by visions that came not from outside them but
from within them. Everything had changed for their kind,
and they could never return to what they once had been.
The epoch had passed when they and the rest of creation
were one and the same. They were beginning to know a
world that did not know them. This is what they thought,
and they thought it was not right. Something which should
not be ... had become. And something had to be done if
they were to flourish as they had before, if the very ground
beneath their feet were not to fall out from under them.
They could do nothing about the world which was moving
farther and farther away and which knew them not. So
something would have to be done about their heads.

Differences

For centuries a debate has been going on among us,
a shadowy polemic that periodically attracts public notice.
The issue: what do people think about being alive?
Overwhelmingly, those questioned will say, 'Being alive is
all right'. More thoughtful respondents will add, 'Especially
when you consider the alternative', betrayingajocularity that
is as logically puzzling as it is macabre, since the alternative
is the first among certitudes that make being alive not

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COLLAPSE IV

all right. These speakers weigh down one side of the survey.
On the other side is a small sample in disagreement with the
majority. Their response to the question of what they think
about being alive will be a negative one. They may even
fulminate about how objectionable it is to be alive. Now,
there are really no incisive answers to why people think
or feel this way or that. But one thing is sure: the people
in the second group are pessimists. And in the minority
opinion of pessimists, most of the people in this world have
to work very hard to keep from thinking there is anything
objectionable about being alive.

Lamentably, we cannot choose to think what we
think or feel what we feel. If we did have this degree of
mastery over our internal lives, then we would be spared
an assortment of sufferings. Psychiatrists would be out
of a job as depressives chose to stop being depressed and
schizophrenics chose to stop being crazy. Most people,
especially those who say that being alive is all right, do
believe they have considerable choice in choosing what
they think and feel. And psychiatrists, who will never be
unemployed, seldom dissuade their clients from believing
they can choose their thoughts and feelings. Nevertheless,
those who believe they can choose what they think and
feel are incapable of choosing what they choose to think and
feel. Should they still believe themselves in control of what
they choose to choose to think and feel, they still could
not choose to choose to choose . . . and so on. Were there
any choice on our part regarding what we think and feel,
it would not be adventurous to conjecture that we would
think about pleasant things rather than horrible things and
choose to feel good rather than bad. Some might even choose
to think about nothing at all and to live in a permanent

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state of euphoria until they died of natural causes. With
godlike power over your thoughts and feelings, you could
do as you choose. And who would choose to think horrible
thoughts and feel bad feelings about being alive?

Zapffe

If the most contemplative individuals are sometimes
dubious about the value of existence, they do not often
publicize their doubts but align themselves with the man
in the street, tacitly declaiming, in more erudite terms,
'Being alive is all right, etc'. The butcher, the baker, and the
crushing majority of philosophers all agree on one thing:
human life is justified, and we should keep our species
going for as long as we can. To tout the opposing side is
asking for grief. But some people seem born to bellyache
that being alive is not all right. Should they vent this
unpopular view in philosophical or literary works, they
may do so without apprehension that their efforts will have
an excess of admirers. Notable among such efforts is The
Last Messiah' (1933), an essay written by the Norwegian
philosopher and man of letters Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-
1990). In this work, which has been twice translated into
English, 2 Zapffe elucidated what he saw as the tragedy of
human existence.

2. 'The Last Messiah', Wisdom in the Open Air: Tlie Norwegian Roots of Deep Ecology
(Minneapolis: Minnesota U. Press, 1993), eds Peter Reed and David Rothenberg
(translators Sigmund Kvaloy with Peter Reed); Philosophy Now, March-April 2004
(translator Gisle R. Tangenes). Regrettably, Zapffe's philosophical masterwork, On
the Tragic (1941), has not appeared in any major language at the time of this writing.
However, abstracts of its substance, as well as excerpts from this treatise and other
writings by Zapffe as translated into English by Tangenes, confirm that throughout
his long life he did not abandon or dilute the pessimistic principles of On the Tragic as
they appear in miniature in 'The Last Messiah'.

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Before discussing why Zapffe saw human existence as
a tragedy, it may be useful to consider a few facts whose
relevance will become manifest down the line. As some
may know, there exist readers who treasure philosophical
and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist
nature as indispensable to their existence, hyperbolically
speaking. Cynical by nature, these persons are well aware
that nothing indispensable to their existence, hyperbolically
or literally speaking, must make its way into their lives, as
if by natural birthright. They do not think that anything
indispensable to anyone's existence may be claimed as a
natural birthright, since the birthrights we commonly
bandy about are all fictions, something we dreamed up
after straying from a factual world into one fabricated by
our heads. For those who have given any thought to this
matter, the only rights we may exercise are these: to seek
the survival of our individual bodies, to create more bodies
like our own, and to perish through a process of corruption
or mortal trauma. This is presuming that one has been
brought to term and has survived to a certain age, neither
being a natural birthright. Stringently considered, our only
natural birthright is to die. No other rights have been allocated
to us except, to repeat, as fabrications. The divine right of
kings may now be acknowledged as a fabrication, a falsified
permit for prideful dementia and impulsive mayhem. The
unalienable rights of certain people, however, seemingly
remain current: whether observed or violated, somehow we
believe they are not fabrications because an old document
says they are real. Miserly or munificent as a given right
may appear, it denotes no more than the right of way
warranted by a traffic light, which does not mean you have
the right to drive free of vehicular misadventures. Ask any
paramedic.

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COLLAPSE IV

Our want of any natural birthright - except to die, in
most cases without assistance - is not a matter of tragedy
but only one of truth. Coming at last to the pith of Zapffe's
thought as spelled out in 'The Last Messiah', the tragedy
of human existence had its beginnings when at some stage
in our evolution we somehow acquired consciousness.
Zapffe believed consciousness to be a mistake in human
evolution, an adventitious outgrowth that made of us
a race of monsters - things that had nothing to do with
the rest of creation. Because of consciousness, we became
susceptible to thoughts that were startling and dreadful to
us. ('I think, therefore I am and will one day die', or thus
might have read Rene Descartes' formulation had he gone
the whole mile with it). Our heads now began dredging
up horrors, flagrantly joyless possibilities, enough of
them to make us drop to the ground in paroxysms of self-
soiling consternation should they go untrammeled. This
potentiality necessitated that certain defense mechanisms be
put to use to keep us balanced on the knife-edge of vitality
as a species. While a modicum of consciousness may have
had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of
our evolution, further escalations of this faculty appeared
to be maladaptive, turning our awareness into a seditious
agent working against us. As the Norwegian philosopher
concluded, along with others before and after him, we must
hamper our consciousness for all we are worth or it will
impose upon us a too clear vision of the 'great matter of
birth and death', to borrow a phrase from Zen Buddhism.
Thus, each of us became a paradox: we could not live with
ourselves as we were and we could not live otherwise. We
could only keep the horror in its box.

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For the rest of the earth's organisms, existence is
relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three
things: survival, reproduction, death - and nothing else.
But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving,
reproducing, dying - and nothing else. We know we are
alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer at
intervals throughout our lives before suffering - slowly or
quickly - at the point of death. This is the knowledge we
'enjoy' as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the
womb of nature. And as such, we feel shortchanged if there
is nothing more for us than to survive, reproduce, and die.
We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there
is. This is the tragedy: consciousness has forced us into
striving to be something other than what we are - hunks of
spoiling flesh on hardening bones. For other organisms, life
is a well-managed ramble toward their demise. But we are
susceptible to startling and dreadful thoughts, and we need
some fabulous illusions to take our minds off them. For us,
then, life is a con game we must run on ourselves, hoping
we do not catch on to any monkey business that would
leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing
bare-assed before the silent, staring void. To end this self-
deception, to free our species from this backbreaking labor
of lies, we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do,
per Zapffe, although in 'The Last Messiah' the character
after whom the essay is named does all the talking about
human extinction. Elsewhere Zapffe speaks for himself on
the subject.

More audacious than it is astonishing, Zapffe's thought
has a substructure in existential psychology and sociology
rather than in metaphysics, analytics, or hard science. It
is penetrable and ineluctably dismal, resting on taboo

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COLLAPSE IV

commonplaces and outlawed truisms while eschewing
the arcane brain-twisters that for thousands of years have
been philosophy's stock-in-trade, "the World as Will and
Representation (two volumes, 1819 and 1844) by the German
philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is perhaps the most
handsome metaphysical system ever elaborated, which
does not mean that the Will-to-live as the causal agent for
everything that moves is not just an overwrought floorshow
for brainiacs. But Zapffe's principles are crystalline and
therefore could never interest professors or practitioners of
philosophy, who prefer to circle around grand exhibitions
of theory wherein harsh realities and reeling senselessness
are secreted behind elegant explications of what our lives
are really about. If we must think, it should be done only in
circles, outside of which lies the unthinkable.

Masterminding

Zapffe's two central propositions as adumbrated
above are as follows. The first is that consciousness has
overreached the point of being a sufferable property of our
species, and thus we thwart it in four principal ways.

(1) Isolation. So that we may get on with living
without going into a free fall of trepidation, we isolate
the dire facts of being alive. These are stowed away in a
remote compartment of our minds. They are the family
freaks in the attic whose existence we deny in a conspiracy
of silence.

(2) Anchoring. To stabilize our lives in the
tempestuous waters of chaos, we conspire to anchor them
in metaphysical and institutional 'verities' - God, Morality,
Natural Law, Country, Family - that imbue us with a sense
of being official, authentic, and safe in our beds.

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(3) Distraction. To keep our heads unreflective of a
world of horrors, we distract them with the worst trash or
the best trash. The most operant and elementary method
for furthering the conspiracy, distraction is in continuous
employ and demands only that everyone keep their eyes on
the ball - or television screen or great book.

(4) Sublimation. That we might annul a paralyzing
stage fright having to do with the nightmare intervals of
being alive, we sublimate our fears by making an open
display of them. In the Zapffian sense, sublimation is the
rarest technique utilized for conspiring against the human
race. Putting into play both deviousness and skill, this is
the process by which thinkers and artistic types recycle the
most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works
in which the worst fortunes of humanity are presented in a
stylized and removed manner as entertainment. In so many
words, these thinkers and artistic types confect products that
provide an escape from our suffering by a bogus simulation
of it - a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for
instance. Zapffe uses 'The Last Messiah' to showcase how
a literary-philosophical opus cannot perturb its creator or
anyone else with the severity of true-to-life horrors, but
only provide a pale representation of these horrors, just as
a movie whose centerpiece is the romance of two young
people, one of whom dies of leukemia, cannot rend its
audience with the throes of the real thing, even if it may
produce an award-winning tearjerker, as in the case of the
1971 film adaptation of Erich Segal's 1970 bestselling novel
Love Story.

By cleaving to these stratagems, we keep ourselves from
scrutinizing too closely the smorgasbord of pain and fear
laid out for us by life.

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COLLAPSE IV

The second of Zapffe's two central propositions - that
our species should refrain from reproducing - brings to
mind a familiar cast of characters. The Gnostic sect of
the Cathari in twelfth-century France were so tenacious in
believing the world to be an evil place engendered by an
evil deity that its members were offered a dual ultimatum:
sexual abstinence or sodomy. (A similar sect in Bulgaria,
the Bogomils, became the etymological origin of the term
'buggery' for their practice of this form of erotic release).
Around the same period, the Catholic Church mandated
abstinence for its clerics, a directive that did not halt them
from betimes giving in to sexual quickening. Most sadly,
the raison d'etre for this doctrine was the attainment of grace
(and in legend was obligatory for those in search of the
Holy Grail) rather than an enlightened governance of
reproductive plugs and bungholes. Lusting to empower
itself, the Church slacked off from the example of its ascetic
founder in order to breed a copious body of followers and
rule as much of the earth as it could.

In another orbit from the theologies of either Gnosticism
or Catholicism, the nineteenth-century German philosopher
Philipp Mainlander (pseudonym of Phillip Batz) advocated
chastity as the surest blueprint for salvation. The target
point of his redemptive plan was the summoning within
ourselves of a 'Will-to-die'. This brainstorm, along with
others as gripping, was advanced by Mainlander in a
treatise whose title has been translated as The Philosophy of
Redemption? Unsurprisingly, the work itself has not been
translated into English. Perhaps the author might have
known greater celebrity if, like the Austrian philosopher

3. Die Philosophic der Erlb'sujig {Berlin: Theodor Hofmann, 1879 [second edition])and
Die philosophic der Erlosund: ^wolfphilosophise/w (Frankfurt am Main: C. Konitzer, 1882-6
[five volumes])

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Otto Weininger in his infamous study translated as Sex and
Character (1903), he had ruminated more about the venereal
goad rather than againstit. Mainlander also made the cardinal
error of pressing his readers to work for such ends as justice
and charity for all. An unbridled visionary although not
of the inspirational sort that receives a charitable hearing
from posterity he shot himself in the foot every chance he
got before aiming the gun a little higher and ending his
life. This act was consummated the day of the publication
of The Philosophy of Redemption. To the end, Mainlander
avouched his personal sense of well-being and proposed
universal suicide for a most esoteric reason (see under the
section 'Deicide' below).

A less composed figure than Mainlander was the Italian
philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter. In his 1910 doctoral
dissertation, published in English as Persuasion and Rhetoric 4 ',
the twenty-three-year-old Michelstaedter critiqued, as later
would Zapffe, the tactics we use to falsify the realities of
human existence in exchange for a speciously comforting
view of our lives. Michelstaedter's biographers and critics
have speculated that his despair of any person's ability to
break through their web of illusions was the cause of his
suicide (two bullets from a gun) the day after he finished his
dissertation. What seems to have finished Michelstaedter
was a stellar fact of human life that he could not accept:
no one has control over how they will be in this world,
a truth that eradicates all hope if how you want to be is
invulnerably self-possessed ('persuaded') and without
subjection to a life that would fit you within the limits of its
unrealities ('rhetoric', a word oddly used by Michelstaedter).

4. Trans. R. S. Valentino, C. S. Blum, and D.J. Depew. New Haven, Conn./London:
Yale University Press, 2004.

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But individuals are defined by their limitations; without
them, we fall outside the barrier of identifiable units,
functionaries in the big show of collective existence. The
farther you proceed toward a vision of humankind under
the aspect of eternity, the farther you drift from what makes
you a person among persons in this world. In the observance
of Zapffe, an overactive consciousness endangers the
approving way in which we define ourselves and our lives.
It does this by threatening our self-limited perception of
who we are and by blackmailing us with unsavoury facts
about what it means to know we are alive and will die. A
person's demarcations as a being, not how far he trespasses
those limits, create his identity and preserve his illusion
of being someone. Transcending all illusions and their
emergent activities would untether us from ourselves and
license the freedom to be no one. In that event, we would
lose our allegiance to our species, stop reproducing, and
quietly bring about our own end. The lesson: 'Let us love
our limitations, for without them nobody would be left to
be somebody'

While recognizing the nuisance of conscious existence,
not all are as unrelenting in their pessimism as Zapffe. In
his 1913 Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations? the Spanish
writer Miguel de Unamuno speaks of consciousness as
a disease bred by a conflict between the rational and the
irrational. The rational is identified with the conclusions
of consciousness, primarily that we will all die. The
irrational represents all that is vital in humanity, including
a universal desire for immortality. The coexistence of the
rational and the irrational turns the human experience
into a wrangle of contradictions to which we can submit

5. Republished, trans. A. Kerrigan, Princeton University Press, 1978

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with a suicidal resignation or obstinately defy as heroes
of futility. Unamuno's penchant is for the heroic course,
with the implied precondition that one has the physical
and psychological spunk for the fight: 'I think, therefore
I know that life is a meaningless bitch and then I will die;
but I cannot let that keep me from living in defiance of
what I know, which is what everyone does, pessimist or
not.' In line with Unamuno, Joshua Foa Dienstag, author
of Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit, 6 also gives the thumbs-
up to the pessimist-as-hero - one who is aware of the
dispiriting lowdown on life and yet marches on. Also
siding with this never-say-die group is William R. Brashear,
whose The Desolation of Reality 1 concludes with a format for
redemption, however partial and imperfect, by means of
what he calls 'tragic humanism', which recognizes human
life's 'ostensible insignificance, but also the necessity of
proceeding as if this were not so, and of willfully nourishing
and sustaining the underlying illusions of value and order'.
Not exactly pessimists in the tradition of Schopenhauer or
Zapffe, Unamuno, Dienstag, and Brashear are at least vocal
about what is at stake for those who know they are alive
and will die.

Meaningfulness

Among the unpleasantries of life that lie in wait is the
abashment some persons suffer because they feel their
lives are destitute of meaning. The sense that one's life has
meaning is sometimes declared to be a necessary condition
for developing or maintaining a state of good feeling. This
is horrendous news considering the mind-boggling number

6. Princeton University Press, 2006.

7. NY: Peter Lang, 1995.

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of books and therapies for a market of discontented
individuals who are short on a sense of meaning, either
in a limited and localized variant ('I received an A on my
calculus exam') or one that is macrocosmic in scope ('There
is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet').
Those who are euphoric, or even moderately content, are
not parched for meaning. Relatively speaking, feeling good
is its own justification. As long as such states last, why louse
up a good thing with self-searching interrogations about
meaning? But an abnormal degree of elation could also
be a sign of psychopathology as it is for individuals who
have been diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder. Such
persons should be treated by mental health professionals,
although psycho-behavioral therapeutics often puts a
patient in the clutches of mind healers who are modern-
day incarnations of positive-thinking preachers such as
Norman Vincent Peale. No one ever bought a copy of
The Power of Positive Thinking who was not dissatisfied with
his or her life. This dissatisfaction is precisely the quality
that the great pessimists - Buddha, Schopenhauer, Freud
- saw as definitive of the human packing plant. Millions of
copies of Peak's book and its reiterations, including Martin
Seligman's Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology
to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment , 9 have been sold.
And they were not purchased by readers who were madly
content with their place on the ladder of subjective well
being, in the vernacular of 'positive psychology'. Neither
have they been documented as hoisting themselves toward
'lasting' fulfillment by reading the books of these gurus of
happiness. 10

8. NY: Prentice Hall, 1952.

9. London: Nicholas Brearley, 2003.

10. For a study based on clinical research that documents one's subjective wellbeing

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While every other creature in the world is insensate to
meaning, those of us on the high ground of evolution are
full of this enigmatic hankering, a preoccupation that any
comprehensive encyclopedia of philosophy treats under
the heading life, the meaning of. We have a need that is
not natural, one that can never be satisfied no matter how
many big lies we swallow. Our unparalleled craving may
be appeased - like the yen of a dope fiend - but we are
deceived if we think it is ever gone for good. Years may pass
during which we are unmolested by life, the meaning of.
Some days we wake up and just say, 'It's good to be alive'. If
everyone were in such elevated spirits all the time, the topic
of life, the meaning of would never rise up in our heads or
our conversations. But this ungrounded jubilation soon runs
out of steam. Our consciousness, having snoozed awhile in
the garden of incuriosity, is pricked by some thorn or other,
perhaps death, the meaning of. Then the hunger returns
for life, the meaning of, the emptiness must be filled again,
the pursuit is resumed. And we will keep chasing after the
impossible until we are no more. This is the tragedy that we
do our best to cover up in order to brave an existence that
holds terrors for us at every turn, with little but blind faith
and habit to keep us on the move.

HUMANNESS

As heretofore posited, consciousness may have facilitated
our species' survival in the hard times of prehistory, but as
it became evermore acute it evolved the potential to ruin
everything if not securely muzzled. This is the problem: we

as a genetically determined lottery and not something that a self-help book can
instruct an individual to achieve, see 'Happiness Is a Stochastic Phenomenon' by
David Lykken and Auke Tellegen, University of Minnesota Psychological Science, 1996.
Believe it or not.

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must either outsmart consciousness or be thrown into its
vortex of doleful factuality and suffer, as Zapffe dubbed it,
a 'dread of being' - not only of our own being but of being
itself. On the strength of this premise, Zapffe inferred that
the sensible thing to do would be to call off all procreative
activities. Not only would it be the sensible thing to do,
but it might be the most telling indication, even the only
indication, of what it means to be human. This could settle
some old questions. Is the condition of being human what
we think it is? And what do we think it is to be human?
Nowhere in philosophy or the arts are there answers on
which we can all agree. Science has us down as a species of
omanic life. But whatever it means to be human, we can at
least say that we have consciousness - an attribute that has
made us the royalty of creation, yet one that we cannot let
get out of hand if we are to survive. Question: why would
we want to survive as a species caught in this double bind?
Answer: because we do not know what it is to be human.

To repeat what cannot be repeated enough: we can
tolerate existence only if we believe - in accord with a
complex of illusions, a legerdemain of deception - that we
are not what we are: unreality on legs. As creatures with
consciousness, we must suppress that divulgement lest it
break us with a sense of being things without significance or
foundation, anatomies shackled to a landscape of pointless
horrors. In plain language, we cannot live with ourselves
except as impostors, paradoxical beings who must lie to
ourselves about ourselves, as well as about our no-win
situation in this world. Thus, we are zealots of Zapffe's
four consciousness-smothering strategies: isolation ('Being
alive is all right'), anchoring ('One Nation under God with
Families, Morality, and Natural Laws for all'), distraction

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('Better to kill time than kill oneself), and sublimation
('I am writing a book entitled The Conspiracy Against the
Human Race'). These practices make us what we are -
beings with a nimble intellect who can deceive themselves
'for their own good'. Isolation, anchoring, distraction, and
sublimation are the wiles we use to keep our heads from
dispelling every illusion that keeps us up and running.
('We think, therefore we know we are alive and will one
day die; so we had better stop thinking, except in circles.')
Without this cognitive double-dealing, our world would be
seen for what it is - something that is not very good to
see, something that everyone glimpses from time to time
and then looks away because they do not want to see too
much of it. Maybe if we could resolutely gaze wide-eyed at
our lives we would know what it is to be human. But that
would stop the puppet show that we like to think will run
forever.

In 'The Last Messiah', Zapffe wrote: 'The whole of
living that we see before our eyes today is from inmost to
outmost enmeshed in repressional mechanisms, social and
individual; they can be traced right into the tritest formulas
of everyday life.' 11 The four formulas that Zapffe picked
out as individual and social mechanisms of repression
are probably the most trite he could have chosen, which
may have been deliberate on his part because they are
so familiar to us and so visible in human affairs. No one
hesitates to admit them. Not overweight persons or tobacco
users, who will promptly admit to playing dumb when
they are scarfing down a cupcake or smoking a cigarette.
Not soldiers fighting a war, who will proudly admit they
are risking their lives and limbs for a good greater than

1 1 . Translation by Gisle R. Tangenes, op. cit.

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themselves - their families, their country, their god. Not
anyone who is going to die soon, who will not voluntarily
admit to playing the same old games for as long as possible
rather than be consumed by thoughts of mortality and the
agony that may precede it. Not artists, who with a shrug
will admit to keeping their aesthetic distance for fear of
being hamstrung by the realities they instantiate (musicians
practice distraction rather than artistic sublimation). Such
repressional mechanisms have been well analyzed by
professional thinkers, particularly in relation to the fear of
death. (For an enumeration of these and other mechanisms
for grappling with thanatophobia, see Choices for Living:
Coping with the Fear of Dying 1,1 by Thomas S. Langer). For
almost all philosophers who write on the subject, death
is studied in the abstract, while the more messy truths
attending it are either bracketed or cold-shouldered. Death,
of course, is only a sub-category of suffering, which, if it is
even recognized by philosophers, is not something they care
to brood upon. Suffering cannot be studied in the abstract.
Philosophically, there is not much that can be done with
it, and those few who try will be arraigned for talking
nonsense. Almost all philosophers balk at saying anything
about suffering, the meaning of. But none of them
hesitate to admit that they, in league with everyone else,
employ repressional mechanisms in their lives. And what
use are repressional mechanisms if not to avoid discussions
about suffering?

12. NY/London: Kluwer, 2002.

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Suffering

In The Open Society and Its Enemies, 13 Karl Popper expounded
a new slant on human suffering. Briefly, he revamped the
Utilitarianism of the nineteenth-century British philosopher
John Stuart Mill, who wrote, 'Actions are right in proportion
as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend
to promote the reverse of happiness'. Popper remolded
this summation of a positive Utilitarianism into a negative
Utilitarianism whose position he handily stated as follows:
'It adds to clarity in the fields of ethics, if we formulate our
demands negatively, i.e. if we demand the elimination of
suffering rather than the promotion of happiness.' Taken
to its logical and most humanitarian conclusion, Popper's
demand can have as its only end the elimination of those
who now suffer and those who will suffer if they are born.
What else could the 'elimination of suffering' mean if not its
total abolition, and ours? Naturally, Popper held his horses
well before suggesting that to eliminate suffering would
demand that we as a species be eliminated. But he should
still be applauded for promoting the basics of a school of
thought that would prefer to eliminate suffering - or at least
tone it down - than to promote happiness in human life.

Other philosophies of a similar type as Negative
Utilitarianism are Abolitionism and Algonomy The people
behind these incipient movements are fiery battlers against
a world that is effectively indifferent to human suffering,
which they have situated as the only problem with being
alive. Abolitionism has gone so far as to preach that not
only should human beings be emancipated from suffering,
they should also know what it is like to feel unbroken
bliss throughout their lives and no mental or physical

13. London: Routkdgc, 1945.

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inconvenience upon their deaths - a Utilitarianism beyond
positivity or negativity. While no safe and efficient means
yet exists to reach this peak existence, the parent figure of
Abolitionism, the British philosopher David Pearce, has
encyclopedically catalogued the ameliorations for suffering
that now exist and has brilliantly outlined what steps we
should presently be taking toward a life of engineered
happiness. Nevertheless, an Abolitionist life would still not
be perfect, since painful fatalities caused by accidents and
natural disasters can never be gotten around. And such a
life would be as useless as any other. That having been
said, the existence that Pearce wants for the human race
would at least not be malignant through and through, since
it would turn the suffering with which we are drenched into
a shower of (mostly) pleasurable sensations.

In 'The Last Messiah', Zapffe is not sanguine about
eliminating suffering, nor is he so unworldly as to beseech
a communal solution for its elimination by snuffing out the
human race, as did the Cathari and the Bogomils. (He does
critique the barbarism of social or religious proscriptions
of suicide, but he is not a standard-bearer for this form
of personal salvation). Zapffe's thought is foremost an
addendum to that of various sects and individuals who
have found human existence to be so unquestionably awful
that extinction is preferable to survival. It also has the
value of advancing a new answer to the old question 'Why
should generations unborn be spared entry into the human
thresher?' But what might be called 'Zapffe's Paradox', in the
tradition of possessively named formulations that saturate
primers of philosophy, is as useless as the propositions
of any other thinker who is pro-life or anti-life or is only
juggling concepts to clinch what is reality and can we ever

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get there. Having said as much, we can continue as if it
had not been said. The value of a philosopher's thought is
not in its answers - no philosopher has any that are more
helpful than saying nothing at all - but in how well they
speak to the prejudgments of their consumers. Such is the
importance - and the nullity - of rhetoric. Ask any hard-
line pessimist, but do not expect him to expect you to take
his words seriously.

The greatest strike against philosophical pessimism is
that its only theme is human suffering. This is the last item
on the list of our species' preoccupations and detracts from
everything of any importance to us, such as the Good,
the Beautiful, and tomorrow's weather. Cures may be
discovered for certain diseases and sociopolitical barbarities
may be amended, but these are only stopgaps. Human
suffering is insoluble as long as human beings exist. The
one truly effective solution for suffering is that spoken of
in Zapffe's 'Last Messiah'. It may not be a realistic solution
for a stopgap world, but it is one that would forever put
an end to suffering, should we ever care to do so. The
pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never
hurt anyone and that conscious existence hurts everyone.
(Uneasy indeed are the heads that wear the crown of
creation). Without consciousness we would still know pain;
suffering, however, would not disturb us.

The twentieth-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein once said or wrote, 'I don't know why we
are here, but I'm pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy
ourselves'. But Wittgenstein's uncertain determination
does not go to the heart of human existence. Hedonism is
irrelevant as ajustification for our lives. No price is too high
for our creaturely reward of just being here and knowing

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that others will be here after us. This is our 'pleasure', and
no amount of suffering will lead our species to question
it. While this pleasure began as a relief from the anxieties
of genealogical slippage, it now stems in the main from
psychological satisfactions. The modern family unit is an
indulgence, not a necessity. It is a satisfaction of the ego or
an appurtenance of one's public image. Children are not
economic insurance for their families but consumer goods,
personal accessories, trinkets or tie-clips. No longer their
parents' employees, as in earlier days, they strike out on their
own and go into business for themselves when sufficient
capital has been accumulated or may be borrowed - life on
the installment plan.

But if the price of suffering has fallen - not that it was
ever unaffordable - we still must deal with a progressively
insidious consciousness, that invader of our homes and
heads. Zapffe's achievement as a pessimist treads beyond
plaints of how rich with suffering life can be. We - as
genetic donors consorting two by two for the protraction of
our species - have no problem with suffering. The problem
for us - as billions of lone individuals who mingle but can
never merge with one another - is the pyrotechnics of
cogitation we must perform to stave off our consciousness
of pain, of death, of life as a danse macabre into which we
are always pulling new partners and lying to them as we lie
to ourselves.

Our success as a survival-happy species is calculated in
the number of years we have extended our lives, with the
reduction of suffering being only incidental to this aim. The
lifespan of non-domesticated mammals has never changed,
while ours has grown by leaps and bounds. What a coup
for us. Unaware of the length of their stay on earth, other

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warm-blooded life forms are sluggards by comparison.
Without consciousness of death, we would not frantically
rouse ourselves to lengthen our mortal tenure. And how
we have cashed in on our efforts: no need to cram our lives
into three decades now that we can cram them into seven,
eight, nine, or more. Time will run out for us as it does for
all creatures, true, but at least we can dream of a day when
we might choose our own deadline. Then everyone could
die of the same thing: satiation with a durability that is
malignantly useless. Without a terminus for the journey
of our lives, their uselessness would become excruciatingly
overt. Knowing ourselves to be on a collision course with
the Black Wall of Death may be a horror, but it is the only
thing that makes it possible to value that which comes
before, if we are not too cast down by thoughts of our
mortality to do so. While this quid pro quo may be a bad
value, without it there is no value. Only a terminal point,
only endness, can make the present seem precious, although
the here-and-now is almost invariably taken for granted so
that we can squander what little time we have by looking
cockeyed to the future. It is in the future that we expect to
inherit a greater value than that which trickles backwards
into our lives from their certain end. But as everyone knows,
even though we disregard this knowledge, the future is only
the present in disguise, and as soon as it arrives we begin
hunting for another future. Not until the future is behind
us can there be any peace on this earth or in our heads. If
only we could end our arduous voyage to a fool's future,
Zapffe's prospectus for our self-extermination would be a
walk in the park. At all levels, the systems of life - from
sociopolitical systems to solar systems - are repugnant and
should be negated as malignantly useless.

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'Worthless' rather than 'useless' is the more familiar
epithet in this context. The motive for using 'useless' in
place of 'worthless' in this histrionically capitalized phrase
is that 'worthless' is tied to the concepts of desirability
and value, and by their depreciation introduces them into
the mix. 'Useless', on the other hand, is not so inviting of
these concepts. 'Worthless' can serviceably be connected
to the language of pessimism and does what damage it
can. But the devil of it is that 'worthless' really does not
go far enough when speaking pessimistically about the
character of existence. Too many times the question 'Is
life worth living?' has been asked. This usage of 'worth'
excites impressions of a fair lot of experiences that are
arguably desirable and valuable within limits and that
follow upon one another in such a way as to suggest that
life is not worthless overall, or not so worthless that a case
could not be made for its worth. With 'useless', the spirits
of desirability and value do not as readily rear their heads,
and existence as dizzying pointlessness state of affairs may
be more in temperately asserted. Naturally, the uselessness
of all that is or could be may be repudiated as well or badly
the worthlessness of all that is or could be. For this reason,
the adverb 'malignantly' has been annexed to 'useless' to
give it a little more semantic stretch, if not enough to deter
any rebuttals from the opposition. But to express with any
adequacy a sense of the sucking uselessness of everything,
a nonlinguistic modality would be needed, some effusion
out of a dream that coalesced every nuance of the useless
and wordlessly transmitted to us the inanity of any possible
thing, conception, or condition. Indigent of such means of
communication, the uselessness of all that exists or possibly
could exist must be spoken with a poor potency.

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Of course, everyone believes there are things,
conceptions, and conditions that are not useless. We all live
within relative frameworks where something may not be
useless - in a practical way - with respect to something
else. A potato masher is not useless if one wants to mash
potatoes. For some people, a system of being that includes
a god may not seem useless, possibly because it involves
concepts such as eternity and infinity. Yet even something
that involves concepts such as eternity and infinity is
not saved from being useless except within a relative
framework of what is not eternal or infinite. It would then
not be useless only in the same relative capacity as a potato
masher. As long as there are entities that are relative to one
another, they will be potato-masher entities. And if there
were a god that had no relation to anything that was not
that god - that was not relative to anything because nothing
else existed - then such a thing would be the paradigm of
uselessness, being that there would be nothing for which it
could not be useless. Should that god drum up a universe in
which there were things for which it would not be useless,
it could only be a potato-masher god. Far more likely in the
minds of many people is that the universe was drummed
up without a god, thereby making the uselessness of that
universe, except in the potato-masher relations of its part,
unbelievably evident. Some people do not get up in arms
about the relativity of everything; others do. The latter
want to worship gods that are not just potato-masher gods
or to think in terms of absolutes that are really absolute
and not just absolute potato-mashers. They cannot accept
an existence in which everything is malignantly useless
except as some species of potato masher. They particularly
do not like to think that they themselves are potato-masher
things living potato-masher lives in a potato-masher world.

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Christians, Jews, and Muslims have a real problem with a
potato-masher world. Buddhists have no problem with it
because for them the way to salvation is to realize the truth
of 'dependent origination', which means that everything
is related to everything else in a great network of potato
mashers that are always interacting with one another.
So the only problem Buddhists have is not being able to
realize that everything is a great network of potato mashers.
They think that if they could get over this hump, then they
would be forever liberated from suffering. In the Buddhist
faith, everyone suffers who cannot see that the world is
a malignantly useless potato-mashing network. Contrary
to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, Buddhists do not have
the handicap of believing in a god or even in their own
reality, although they do have other handicaps.

Discontent

Being royally conscious of the solemn precincts in which
we exist, of the savage wasteland and sordid burlesque that
lies beneath life's piddling nonsense, would turn us to dust.
Saddled with self-knowledge, we thrive only insofar as we
vigilantly obfuscate our heads with every baseless belief or
frivolous recreation at our disposal. But as much as our
heads are inclined to clog themselves with such trash, a
full-scale blockage is impossible. This impossibility makes
us heirs to a legacy of discontent. In his study Suicide (1897),
the French sociologist Emile Durkheim contended that
'one does not advance when one proceeds toward no goal,
or - which is the same thing - when the goal is infinity.
To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to
condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness'. Who
can gainsay that the goal of our race has no visible horizon

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and therefore, in Durkheim's view, we are doomed, as the
French thinker rather euphemistically put it, to 'a state of
perpetual unhappiness'? Along similar lines, psychoanalyst
Adam Phillips writes in his Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories
and Death Stories: u 'Tyrannical fantasies of our own
perfectibility lurk in even our simplest ideals, Darwin and
Freud intimate, so that any ideal can become another excuse
for punishment. Lives dominated by impossible ideals,
complete honesty, absolute knowledge, perfect happiness,
eternal love are experienced as continuous failures.' (Phillips'
twist of mind may be seen as self-serving due to his belief in
psychoanalysis, which by its nature is not designed to make
people happy on a tight schedule, or to make them happy
at all). To counter these glum assessments of things, the
world's religions all offer goals that they say are very much
attainable, if only in the afterlife or the next life.

In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), existentialist superstar
Albert Camus represents the unattainable goal of the
title figure as an apologetic for going on with life rather
than ending it. As Camus insisted in his discussion of this
gruesome parable, 'We must imagine Sisyphus as happy'
The credo of the Church Father Tertullian, 'I believe
because it is absurd', might as rightly be attributed to Camus.
Caught between the fabrications of the Carthaginian and
the rationalizations of the Frenchman, Zapffe's proposal
that we put out the light of the human race extends to us
a solution to our troubles that is infinitely more satisfying
than that of either Tertullian or his modern avatar Camus,
who considered suicide as a philosophical issue for the
individual yet, by some oversight, did not entertain the
advantages of an all-out attrition of the species. Aside from

14. London: Fabcr, 1999.

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a repertoire of tricks we can do that other animals cannot,
the truest indicator of a human being is unhappiness.
The main fount of that unhappiness, as Zapffe and others
have written, is our consciousness. And the more dilated
consciousness becomes, the more unhappy the human. In
the end, Camus' injunction that we must imagine Sisyphus
as happy is as unavailing as it is feculent.

On the subject of whether or not life is worth the trouble,
the answer must always be unambivalent . . . and positive.
To teeter the least bit into the negative is tantamount to
moral suicide. If you value your values, no doubts about
this matter can be raised, unless they occur as a lead-up to
some determinate affirmation. In the products of high or
low culture, philosophical disquisitions, and arid chitchat,
the anthem of life must forever roar above the squeaks of
dissent and must be delivered to us without abatement
or appreciable contradiction. We were all born into a
rollicking game that has been too long in progress to allow a
substantive change in the rules. Should the incessant fanfare
that meets your ears day in and day out sound out of tune
and horribly inappropriate, you will be branded persona non
grata and welcome wagons will not stop at your door. So if
you know what is best for you and want a good seat from
which to watch human existence as it goes by, you must not
recognize Zapffe's proposal for the salvation-by-extinction
of the human race as a solution to the absurdity of life.

Those who treasure philosophical and literary works of
a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable
to their existence are hopelessly frustrated with living in a
world on autopilot when they would like to switch it over
to manual consciousness and nosedive humanity into a
crash without survivors. On the flip side, most ordinary

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people can live with discontent because it is concomitant
with their expectation that humanity will forever 'survive'
(Middle English by way of Middle French from the Latin
supervivere - to outlive or live beyond). Bulletin: we, as
a subcategory of the melange of earth's organisms, may
outlive other species, but we will not live beyond our own
time of extinction, as over ninety-nine percent of preceding
life forms on this planet have not lived beyond theirs. We
can pretend this will not happen, fantasizing super-scientific
eternities, but in good time we will be taken out of the scene.
This turn of events will be the defeat of Project Immortality,
which has been in the works for millennia.

Mistake

Consciousness is an existential liability, as every pessimist
agrees. It is also a mistake that has taken humankind down
a black hole of logic: to make it through this life, we must
pretend that we are what we are not, according to Zapffe's
Paradox. To correct this mistake, we should desist from
procreating. What could be more judicious or more urgent?
At the very least, we might give some regard to this theory
of the mistake as a 'thought-experiment'. All civilizations
become defunct. All species die out. All the suns of all the
galaxies will blow up. There may even be an expiration
date on the universe itself. Human beings would certainly
not be the first phenomenon to go belly up. But we could
be the first to spot our design-flaw, that absent-minded
flub of nature called consciousness, and do something
about it. And if we are mistaken about consciousness
being a mistake, our self-removal from this planet would
still be a magnificent move on our part, the most laudable
masterstroke of our existence, and the only one. No evil

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would attend our departure from existence, and the many
evils we have known would go extinct along with us.

Taking our leave from life might seem a thoroughly
negative course of action, but it is not as simple as that.
Every negation is adulterated or secretly initiated by an
affirmative spirit, mass suicide included. An unequivocal
'no' cannot be uttered or acted upon. Lucifer's last words in
heaven may have been 'Non serviam', but none has served
the Almighty so well, since His sideshow in the clouds
would never draw any customers if it were not for the main
attraction of the devil's hell on earth. Only catatonics and
coma patients have what it takes to sit out the horseplay of
creation. Without a 'yes' in our hearts, nothing would be
done. And to be done with our existence en masse would be
the most ambitious affirmation of all.

With regard to consciousness, 'fluke' or 'mutation',
rather than 'mistake', would be more accurate terms in the
present discussion, since it is not in the nature of Nature
to make mistakes - it just makes what it makes. 'Mistake'
has been used for its pejorative connotation in 'The Last
Messiah'. Of course, phenomena other than consciousness
have been thought to be a mistake, beginning with life itself.
For example, in a novel titled At the Mountains of Madness
(1936), the American writer H. P. Lovecraft has one of his
characters mention a 'primal myth' about 'Great Old Ones
who filtered down from the stars and concocted earth life
as a joke or mistake'. Schopenhauer, once he has drafted
his theory that everything in the universe is energized
by a Will-to-live, shifts to a commonsense pessimism to
visualize a species inattentive to the possibility that its life is
a concatenation of snafus.

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Many millions, united into nations, strive for the common
good, each individual for his own sake; but many thousands
fall sacrifice to it. Now senseless delusion, now intriguing
politics, incite them to wars with one another; then the sweat
and blood of the multitude must flow, to carry through the
ideas of individuals, or to atone for their shortcomings. In
peace, industry and trade are active, inventions work miracles,
seas are navigated, delicacies are collected from all the ends
of the earth; the waves engulf thousands. All push and drive,
some plotting and planning, others acting; the tumult is
indescribable. But what is the ultimate aim of it all? lb sustain
ephemeral and harassed individuals through a short span of
time, in the most fortunate cases with endurable want and
comparative painlessness (though boredom is at once on the
lookout for this) , and then the propagation of this race and of
its activities. With this evident want of proportion between the
effort and the reward, the will-to-live, taken objectively, appears
to us from this point of view as a folly, or taken subjectively,
as a delusion. Seized by this, every living thing works with the
utmost exertion of its strength for something that has no value.
But on closer consideration, we shall find here also that it is
rather a blind urge, an impulse wholly without ground and
motive. 15

Schopenhauer is here straightforward in limning his
awareness that, for human beings, being alive is all 'folly'
and 'delusion'. He also noted elsewhere in his work that
consciousness is 'an accident of life'.

Schopenhauer's is a great pessimism, not least because
it revealed a pattern underlying the pessimistic imagination.
As indicated, Schopenhauer's insights are yoked to a
philosophical superstructure centered on the Will, or the

15. The Warldas Will and Representation, trans. E.J. F. Payne (NY: Dover, 1969).

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Will-to-live, a blind, deaf, and dumb force that surfaced for
reasons unknown, assembled a universe, and, once human
bodies had shot up within it, mobilized them to their
detriment. While Schopenhauer's metaphysics is impossible
to swallow and could never persuade anyone of its validity,
no intelligent person can fail to see that every living thing
behaves exactly in conformance with his thought in its liberal
articulation: wound up like toys by some force - call it Will,
elan vital, anima mundi, or whatever - organisms go on running
until they run down. In pessimistic philosophies, only the
force is real, not the things that are activated by it. They are
only automata, puppets, and, if they have consciousness
mistakenly, believe that they are self-winding selves and not
self-conscious nothings suffering from Zapffe's Paradox.
Here, then, is the pattern Schopenhauer made discernable
in pessimism: behind and beyond the scene of life, there
are machinations that are not amenable to resistance
or control. For Zapffe, consciousness is a mistake, but it
is also a mystery whose workings elude us while we are
tugged along by the invisible hand of nature to survive and
reproduce. For Unamuno, we are prodded by an irrational
and irresistible vitalism to letch after immortality. For
Michelstaedter, individuals are fitted into a straightjacket
by faceless doctors who control their patients' minds with
unrealities. For Mainlander, a Will-to-die, not a Will-to-live,
plays the occult master pulling our strings.

Of a kind with these scheming powers that the pessimist
places in the background of life are those enormities that
skulk within the narratives of the great supernatural horror
writers. In conceiving Azathoth, that 'nuclear chaos' which
'bubbles at the center of all infinity', Lovecraft might
well have been thinking of Schopenhauer's Will. In 'The

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Willows', the twentieth-century British writer Algernon
Blackwood suggests the existence of a minatory force as
unseen and pitiless as Zapffe's Nature. Such supernatural
writers are great because they do not follow the rules of
popular horror literature: there are no 'good versus evil'
scenarios in their stories and no one need survive to make
for a good ending. Human beings are set up to be destroyed,
as they are in reality, and their destruction occurs not in
an everyday world bustling with life and pleasure but in
hermetic haunts bustling with death and suffering.

Ecocide

Despite Zapffe's work as a philosopher, although not in
an occupational capacity (he earned his living by writing
poems, plays, stories, and humorous pieces) , he is nonetheless
better known as an early ecologist who popularized the
term 'biosophy' to name a discipline that would broaden
the compass of philosophy to include the interests of other
living things besides human beings. Thereupon, he serves as
an inspiration to the environmentalist agenda, the politics of
the health of the earth. Here, too, we catch ourselves - and
Zapffe himself, as he affirmed - in the act of conspiring to
build barricades against the odious facts of life by isolation,
anchoring, distraction, and sublimation as we engage in an
activity (in this case the cause of environmentalism) that
bypasses the perennial issue. Vandalism of the environment
is but a sidebar to humanity's refusal to look its fate in the
face. We live in a habitat of unrealities - not of earth, air,
water, and wildlife - and cuddly illusion trumps grim logic
eveiy time. Some of the more militant environmentalists,
however, have concurred with Zapffe that we should retire
from existence, although their advocacy of abstinence and

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universal suicide to save the earth from being pillaged by
human beings is not exactly what the philosopher had in
mind. While a worldwide suicide pact is highly appealing,
what romantic fabrications would cause one to take part in
it just to conserve this planet? The earth is not our home.
We came from nothing, and to that condition our nostalgia
should turn. Why would anyone care about this dim bulb
in the blackness of space? The earth produced us, or at
least subsidized our evolution. Is it really entitled to receive
a pardon, never mind the sacrifice of human lives, for this
original sin - a capital crime in reverse (just as reproduction
makes one an accessory before the fact to an individual's
death)? Someone once said that nature abhors a vacuum.
This is precisely why nature should be abhorred. Instead,
the nonhuman environment is simultaneously extolled and
ravaged by a company of poor players who can no longer
act naturally. It is one thing for animals to feed and fight
and breed in an unthinking continuance of their existence.
It is quite another for humans to do so, since it is possible
for us to ask the wholly legitimate question: 'Is it really all
right for us to be alive and know that we will die?'

It might be theorized that the human species evolved to
serve as nature's roundabout way of cutting into its veins
and bleeding out. A strange idea, no protesting that, but
not the strangest we have ever heard or lived by. We could
at least take up the theory and see where it leads. If it is
false, then where is the harm? But until it is proven so, we
must let ourselves be drawn along by nature's plan, as we
always have, if only by twiddling our thumbs and letting
its suicidal course continue without interference. From a
human vantage, would this not be a just self-punishment
on nature's part for fashioning a world in which pain is

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essential, a world that could not exist without pain, a world
where pain is the guiding principle of all organisms, which
are inexorably pushed by pain throughout their lives to
do that which will improve their chances to create more of
themselves? Left unchecked, this process will last as long as
a single cell remains quivering in this cesspool of the solar
system, this toilet of the galaxy. So why not lend a hand in
assisting nature's suicide, in case it has second thoughts?
For want of a deity, let the earth take the blame for our
troubles. What else is it good for? Let it save itself if it can
- the condemned are known for the acrobatics they will
execute to wriggle out of their sentences - but if it cannot
destroy what it has made, then may it perish along with
every other living thing it has brought forth in pain. While
pain is not a problem for species, even a hyper-conscious
hive of creatures such as human beings for whom pain has
been upgraded to suffering, it is not a phenomenon whose
praises are often sung.

Deicide

The idea of a self-destructing nature parallels
Mainlander's fantasy in which the Will-to-die that should
inhere in humanity is only a reflection of the death wish
of a God who, in the beginning, masterminded His own
quietus from an existence He did not want to spin out
any longer than it had already been spun. God's plan to
suicide himself could not work, though, while he existed as
a unified entity outside of space-time and matter. Seeking
to nullify His oneness so that He could be delivered into
nothingness, he disintegrated Himself - big bang-like -
into the time-bound fragments of the universe, which
included organic life forms. In Mainlander's philosophy,

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'God knew that he could change from a state of super-reality
into non-being only through the development of a real
world of multiformity' Through this method, He excluded
Himself from existence. 'God is dead', wrote Mainlander,
'and His death was the life of the world'. Once the great
individuation had been accomplished, the momentum of
its creator's self-annihilation would continue until nothing
remained standing. And those who committed suicide, as
did Mainlander, would only be following God's example
and moving toward the end of the Creation. Furthermore,
the Will-to-live that Schopenhauer argued activates the
world was revised by his disciple Mainlander as evidence
not of a movement of a tortured life within beinss, but as a
deceptive cover for an underlying will in all things to burn
themselves out as hastily as possible in the fires of becoming
... or begoing, as it were. In this light, human progress is
shown to be an ironic symptom that our downfall into
extinction has been progressing nicely, because the more
things changed, the more they progressed toward a reliable
end.

While the wisdom of religions such as Christianity
and Buddhism is all for leaving this world behind, their
leave-taking is for destinations unknown and impossible to
conceive. For Mainlander, these destinations do not exist.
His forecast is that one day our will to survive in this life or
any other will be universally extinguished by a conscious
will to die and stay dead, after the example of God.
From the standpoint of Mainlander's philosophy, Zapffe's
Last Messiah would not be an unwelcome sage but a
crowning force that has been in the works since God took
his own life. Rather than resist our end, as Mainlander
concludes, we will come to see that the knowledge that life

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is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom. Elsewhere
the philosopher states, Life is hell, and the sweet still night
of absolute death is the annihilation of hell. Mainlander's
cosmic scenario, inhospitable as it is to all other ideations
that include a god-figure, should give pause to those
absorbed with supernatural schemes that are no less bizarre
(for example, the much-studied soteriology of the Gnostics) .
Consider this: if God exists, or once existed, what would
He not be capable of doing? Why should God not want
to be done with Himself as a reaction to His suffering the
sickness and pain now reflected in His creation? Why
should He not have kicked off a universe that is one great
puppet show destined by Him to be crunched or scattered
until an absolute nothingness has been established? Why
should He fail to see the benefits of nonexistence, as many
of us lesser beings have? Alone and immortal, nothing
needed Him. In the same way, nothing in this world needs
us, which could be why we created a god who pays attention
to everything we do, since no other organism cares about
us or could be diminished by our extinction. (Quite the
opposite) . Mainlander's first philosophy, and last, is in fact
odd, but no more so than those of any religious or secular
ethos that presupposes the worth of human life. Both are
objectively insupportable and come out of nowhere: they
are only propensities in search of validation. 16

16. This precis of Mainlander's philosophy is sourced in Thomas Whittaker's Essays
and Notices Philosophy mid Psychological, 1895; Rudolph Steiner's The Riddles of Philosophy,
1914, and Evil: Selected Lectures, 1918; Radoslav Tsanoffs The Nature of Evil, 1931;
Johann Joachin Gerstering's German Pessimism and Indian Philosophy: A PLermennetic
Reading, 1986; and Henry Sheldon's Unbelief in the Nineteenth Century, 2005. For a
rebuttal of Mainlander's thought, see H. P. Blavatsky's 'The Origin of Evil' in the
October 1897 issue of the journal Lucifer.

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Pessimism

It would be a sign of callowness to bemoan the fact that
pessimistic writers do not rate and may be denounced in
both good conscience and good company. This judgment
makes every kind of sense in a world of card-carrying or
crypto-optimists. Once you understand that, you can spare
yourself from suffering excessively at the hands of 'normal
people', a pestilent confederation of upstanding creatures
who in concert keep the conspiracy going by rehashing
their patented banalities and watchwords. This is not
to say that such people do not have their struggles and
responsibilities, their pains and sufferings, and their deaths
by accident, murder, or disease, which only makes all the
more pestilent their normal thinking that being alive is all
right and that happiness should attend upon the arrival
of life's newcomers, who, it is always assumed, will be
normal.

Phobic to any somber cast of thought, humankind
as nonetheless imbibed ever-increasing disillusionments
throughout its history. The biblical Genesis, along with all
other fables of origination, has been reduced to a mythic
analogue of the big bang theory and the primordial soup.
Pantheon after pantheon has been belittled into 'things
people used to believe'. And petitions for divine intervention
are murmured only inside the tents of religious fanatics and
faith-healers. In the past century or so, disillusionments of
this kind have become the province of specialists in the
various sciences, so they are not well understood by, if
known to, those who go to church on Sunday and read
the astrology column in the newspaper the rest of the
week. Generalists of disillusionment broadcast on a wider
frequency. Yet their message, a repetitive dirge that has

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been rehearsed for thousands of years, is received only
by epicures of pessimism, cognitive mavericks who have
impetuously circled the field in a race to the finish line.

Contemporaneous withevery generation, disillusionment
must proceed furtively. Anyone caught trying to accelerate
its progression will be reprimanded and told to sit in the
corner. While the Church has lost its clout to kill or torture
dissenters such as Zapffe, Schopenhauer, and Lovecraft,
they are still under watch by guard dogs both sacred and
secular. A sign of progress, some would say. But sufferance
of such minds should not lead us into premature self-
congratulation. The pace at which our kind plods toward
disillusionment is geologically slow, and humanity can be
cocksure of kicking the bucket by natural causes or an 'act
of God' before it travels very far toward that radiant day
when with one voice it might cry out, 'Enough of this error
of conscious life. It shall be passed down no longer to those
innocents unborn'.

258

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Spectral Dilemma 1

Quentin Meillassoux

Mourning to come, god to come.

[...] every man has two things belonging to him, namely, a life
and a phantom. 2

1. The Spectral Dilemma

What is a spectre? A dead person who has not been
properly mourned, who haunts us, bothers us, refusing
to pass over to the 'other side', where the dearly-departed
can accompany us at a distance sufficient for us to live our
own lives without forgetting them, but also without dying
their death - without being the prisoner of the repetition
of their final moments. Then what is a spectre become the
essence of the spectre, the spectre par excellence? A dead
person whose death is such that we cannot mourn them.

1. Originally published as 'Dilemme Spectrale' in Critique 704-705, Jan/Feb 2006.

2. E. Tylor, Religion in Primitive Culture {New York: Harper and Row, 1950), 12.

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That is to say: a dead person for whom the work of
mourning, the passage of time, proves inadequate for a
tranquil bond between them and the living to be envisaged.
A dead person the horror of whose death lays heavy not
only upon their nearest and dearest, but upon all those who
cross the path of their history.

Essential spectres are those of terrible deaths: premature
deaths, odious deaths, the death of a child, the death of
parents knowing their children are destined to the same end
- and yet others. Natural or violent deaths, deaths which
cannot be come to terms with either by those whom they
befall, or by those who survive them. Essential spectres
are the dead who will always refuse to 'pass over', who
obstinately cast off their shroud to declare to the living,
in spite of all evidence, that they still belong amongst
them. Their end attests to no meaning, brings with it
no completion. These are not necessarily shadows who
declare their revenge, but shadows who cry out beyond all
vengeance. Whoever commits the imprudence of lending
an ear to their call risks passing the rest of his life hearing
their complaint.

We will call essential mourning the completion of mourning
for essential spectres: that is to say the accomplishment of a
living, rather than morbid, relation of the survivors to these
terrible deaths. Essential mourning assumes the possibility
of forming a vigilant bond with these departed which does
not plunge us into the hopeless fear - itself mortifying -
that we feel when faced with their end, but which, on the
contrary, actively inserts their memory into the fabric of our
existence. To accomplish essential mourning would mean:
to live with essential spectres, thereby no longer to die with
them. To make these spectres live rather than becoming,

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in hearing their voices, the mere shadow of a living being.
The question which poses itself to us is thus the following:

is essential mourning possible - and if so, under what conditions'?

Is it possible, after a twentieth century whose history was
dominated by odious deaths, to live a non-morbid relation
with the departed, for the most part unknown to us, and
yet still too close for our lives not to be secretly gnawed
away at by them? At first glance, we seem to find ourselves
constrained to respond in the negative. For this essential
mourning seems impossible to envisage if it is referred to
the general alternative of which the relation to the departed
seems to admit. This alternative can be stated, summarily,
in very simple terms: either God exists, or he doesn't.
Or more generally: either a merciful spirit, transcending
humanity, is at work in the world and its beyond, bringing
justice for the departed; or such a transcendent principle is
absent. Now, it becomes rapidly apparent that neither of
these two options - let's call them for convenience religious
or atheistic, however innumerable the ways in which they
can be configured - allows the requisite mourning to take
place. To say that God exists, or that he does not - whatever
is thought through these two statements, both are paths to
despair when confronted with spectres. To demonstrate
this, let us directly exhibit, in the form of 'cases for the
defence', what appear to us to be the strongest responses of
each position to the challenge of such a mourning.

Take the following religious apology: 'I might hope
to come to terms with my own death, but not that of
terrible deaths. It is terror in confronting these past deaths,
irremediably past, not my coming end, which makes me
believe in God. Certainly, if my disappearance, by some
chance, should be terrible, then I shall die hoping for myself

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what I hope for spectres. But I myself am but a spectre in
waiting. I can be Sadducean for myself, and for others, but
I will always be Pharisean for spectres. Or again: I might
be rigorously atheist for myself, might refuse to believe in
immortality for myself, but I could never do so for them:
For the idea that all justice is impossible for the innumerable
massed spectres of the past corrodes my very core, so that
I can no longer bear with the living. Certainly, it is they,
the living, who need help, not the dead; but I think that
help to the living can only proceed given some hope for
justice for the dead. The atheist might well deny it: for my
part if I were to renounce this, I could not live. I must hope
for something for the dead also, or else life is vain. This
something is another life, another chance to live - to live
something other than that death which was theirs.'

Now take the following, atheist response: 'You want to
hope, you say, for something for the dead. Let's look closer,
then, at what you promise them. You hope for justice in
the next world: but in what would this consist? It would
be a justice done under the auspices of a God who had
himself allowed the worst acts to be committed, in the case
of criminal deaths, or who himself had committed them,
in the case of natural deaths. You call just, and even good,
such a God. But what would you think of this: the promise
to live eternally under the reign of a being called just and
loving, who has, however, let men, women and children
die in the worst circumstances, when he could have saved
them without any difficulty whatsoever; who has even
directly inflicted such sorrows - And even this, He says, as
a mark of his infinite (and thus mysterious, unfathomable)
love for the creatures he thus afflicts. To live under the
reign of such a perverse being, who corrupts the most

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noble words - love, justice - with his odious practices: isn't
this a good definition of hell? You say that in the dazzling
presence of such a God, I will grasp the infinitely loving
nature of his attitude to his creatures? You only succeed in
exacerbating the nightmare you promise: for you suppose
that this being has the power to spiritually transform me in
such a radical fashion as to make me love He who allows
such atrocities to occur, for having let those atrocities occur.
This is a promise of a spiritual death infinitely worse than
a merely bodily death: in the presence of God, I will cease
to love the Good, for He would have the power to make
me love Evil as if it were Good. If God exists, the exit of
the dead is thus aggravated to infinity: their bodily death is
redoubled in their spiritual death. To this hell you wish for
them, I prefer, for them as for myself, nothingness, which
will leave them in peace and conserve their dignity, rather
than putting them at the mercy of the omnipotence of your
pitiless Demiurge.'

We can see that each of these two positions is only
supported by the weakness of the other: the atheist is
atheist because religion promises a fearful God; the believer
anchors his faith in the refusal of a life devastated by the
despair of terrible deaths. Each masks his specific despair
by exhibiting his avoidance of the other's despair. Thus the
dilemma is as follows: either to despair of another life for
the dead, or to despair of a God who has let such deaths
take place.

We will call spectral dilemma the aporetic alternative of
atheism and religion when confronted with the mourning
of essential spectres. 3 In this aporetic alternative, we

3. I have called 'religious' every position which brings together the thesis of a life
beyond the grave with the existence of a personal God; 'atheistic' every position

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oscillate between the absurdity of a life without God, and
the mystery of a God who calls 'love' his laissez-faire and
production of extreme evil: the double form of a failure to
accomplish essential mourning. On the contrary we will
call a resolution of the spectral dilemma a position which
would be neither religious nor atheist, and which, because
of this, would manage to extract itself from the double
despair inherent to their alternative: despairing at the belief
injustice for the dead, or believing despairingly in a God
without justice. Our question concerning the possibility of
essential mourning can be reformulated as follows: Under
what conditions could we hope to resolve the spectral dilemma?
How to think a bond between the living and dead which
extracts itself from the twofold distress of the atheist and
the religious believer?

To sketch a possible response to this question, we
must proceed in the following fashion: we must exhibit
the conditions of a solution to the dilemma, and evaluate
the theoretical legitimacy of the latter along with its
credibility. We do not exclude, of course, the possibility
that this solution might eventually turn out to be illusory,
and that we might have in the end to renounce extracting
ourselves from the atheo-religious alternative. But this
potential renunciation must proceed only from the precise
examination of the solution. Not being able to present the

which recuses both of these theses. One might certainly conceive of positions
which derogate from this convenient classification: Sadduceanism, evoked above,
conjugates the belief in a personal God with the refusal of immortality; Spinozism,
on the other hand, conjugates the recusal of a personal God with the thesis of a
possible immortality. However, such positions do not change the essential point of
the analysis: the incapacity of the principal systems of representation to resolve the
spectral dilemma. In the case of Sadduceanism, I add to the despair of an evil God
the despair of the non-resurrection of the dead; in the case of Spinozism, I must
renounce all hope of a happy immortality for those who perished too soon to accede
to wisdom, and accommodate myself to the pitiless necessity which presides over
this type of destiny.

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latter in its totality, we will content ourselves here with
commencing its exposition.

2. Conditions for the Resolution of the Dilemma:
The Divine Inexistence

Let us begin by exposing what we shall call the
'formal' conditions for a resolution of the dilemma. These
conditions constitute at once the irreducibly legitimate part
of the two preceding positions - atheistic and religious -
and the source of the aporia. Each of these positions of the
dilemma exhibits, we believe, an indispensable element of
essential mourning:

- the religious position establishes that mourning
is not possible unless we can hope for the dead
something other than their death. The spectres
will not pass over to the other world until the day
we might hope to see them rejoin ours.

- The atheistic position establishes that the
existence of God is an insurmountable obstacle
to the elaboration of such despair, for only a
perverse God could permit terrible deaths, and
only an even more perverse God could make
himself loved for doing so.

The aporia stems from the fact that these two conditions,
equally indispensable, appear incompatible. There is only
one way, then, to lift this impasse: we must prove that the
incompatibility between these conditions is only apparent,
and that there exists a third option, neither religious nor
atheistic, capable of coherently combining the two elements
of the response. From this point on, our path is clear:
resolving the dilemma comes down to making thinkable the statement

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conjugating the possible resurrection of the dead - the religious
condition of the resolution - and the inexistence of God - the
atheistic condition of the resolution. These two elements
will be synthesised in the following statement, which will
occupy our attention from now on:

God no longer exists.

This statement formulates a thesis which we will call
the thesis of divine inexistence, an expression that must be
understood in the twofold sense that permits its equivocity.
Firstly, in an immediate fashion, the divine inexistence
signifies the inexistence of the religious God, but also the
metaphysical God, supposed actually existent as Creator
or Principle of the world. But the divine inexistence also
signifies the divine character of inexistence: in other words, the
fact that what remains still in a virtual state in present reality
harbours the possibility of a God still to come, become
innocent of the disasters of the world, and in which one
might anticipate the power to accord to spectres something
other than their death.

The position of the divine inexistence allows us to
grasp the source of the apparent insolubility of the spectral
dilemma. The latter comes from the fact that atheism and
religion seem to constitute an alternative exhausting all the
possibilities: either God exists, or he does not. But the two
theses are in truth stronger than these factual statements:
for their sense lies in the supposedly necessary character of
either the inexistence or the existence of God. To be atheist
is not simply to maintain that God does not exist, but also
that he could not exist; to be a believer is to have faith in
the essential existence of God. We now see that the thesis
of the divine inexistence must, to gain ground against such
an alternative, shift the battle to the terrain of modalities:

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It is a question of maintaining that God is possible - not in
a subjective and synchronous sense (in the sense that I
maintain that it is possible that God currently exists), but in
an objective future sense (where I maintain that God could
really come about in the future). At stake is the unknotting
of the atheo-religious link between God and necessity (God
must or must not exist) and its reattachment to the virtual
(God could exist).

The question then takes on a greater precision:
resolving the spectral dilemma comes down to exhibiting
the exact sense of the divine inexistence, at the same time as
establishing that one can legitimately adhere to it.

The thesis - God no longer exists - can be decomposed
according to two poles of signification which must then be
studied consecutively:

1. What must be signified by a 'no longer', in order
for a god to be thought as one of its eventualities?
Such an examination comes down to thinking the
signification of a time compatible with essential
mourning: What is time, if it contains the divine
as one of its virtualities, and what could legitimate
our belief in the effectivity of the latter?

2. What does the signifier 'god' really mean once the
latter is no longer posited as existing - as possible
and to come, but no longer as actual and necessary?
Such an examination would necessitate, notably,
an elaboration of the elements of a discourse on
the divine distinct from all theology founded on
the thesis of an eternal God.

Within the confines of the present article we can only
broach the first point. We will thus agree here to understand

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COLLAPSE IV

by 'god' the minimal sense required for an essential
mourning to be envisaged: the emergence of a regime of
existence in which, for the spectres, something begins other
than their death.

3. Speculative Treatment of Hume's problem

What would a time capable of divine emergence be?
And what could make us decide to adhere to the idea of
such a time, knowing that our all-too-evident desire to
believe, far from rendering the task easier for us, can only
increase our suspicion in regard to every plea which flatters
our hopes?

Before entering into the heart of the subject, let us begin
by distinguishing the so-called 'occult' senses of the divine
inexistence, that is to say those which rest upon the thesis
that a hidden law exists, unknown for the moment, but
capable of being at the origin of a redemption to come. This
thesis comes down to an atheistic or religious interpretation
of the divine inexistence, depending on whether it will be a
question of founding the hope of rebirth on the Promethean
mastery of death by a future humanity supposed technically
capable of effectuating it; or a question of maintaining that
a necessary process of divinisation of the world is already
secretly in progress, which will culminate in universal
justice for the living and the dead alike. In both cases, one
maintains that an occult law exists upon which all hopes
must rest: a natural law not yet known, of the resurrection
of bodies, a providential law of progressive emergence of the
divine - indemonstrable, even fantastic, theses, incapable in
any case of supporting any serious hope.

But as soon as we prohibit ourselves any such path, we

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must say of the sought-after God not only that it must be
posited as inexistent and possible, but also that it can only
be conceived as contingent and unmasterabk. This God, in fact,
cannot be posited except as contingent, in the sense that, if
its thinkability supposes that nothing prohibits its advent,
inversely, no destinal law can be supposed to guarantee
its emergence, for such a supposition is still theoretically
exorbitant. It must be able to be, but nothing can be
thought that constrains it to be. And this God can only be
thought as unmasterable in its advent, in the sense that it
must exceed all phantasmatic hopes of absolute domination
of nature on the part of man. Neither Prometheanism of
death vanquished, nor providentialism of a god to come -
which are just exacerbated versions of atheism and religion
confronted with the spectral dilemma - can found the hope
of a solution.

Taking as granted the following hypotheses:

1. The laws of nature do not allow us to hold
out any serious hope of a future rebirth of the
departed.

2. Neither is there any hope of a transcendent
Order of laws of nature, a bringer of justice for
living and dead, whether actually at work, or in
the course of emerging.

What outcome remains to us? It suffices, in response to
this question, to determine what it is in such hypotheses
that constitutes an obstacle to essential mourning: What
seems to prohibit any resolution of the spectral dilemma,
once I renounce the idea that a law exists, either natural or
supernatural, capable of realising my hopes? The response
is obvious: If I admit that there only exist natural laws
incapable of resolving my dilemma, then this dilemma is

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insoluble, in so far as - but only in so far as - I admit also
the necessity of the laws of nature. It is not the incompatibility
between the laws of nature and the divine which prevents
essential mourning: it is the belief in the necessity of such
laws. And it is indeed this modal thesis which founds the
atheistic belief in the impossibility of the existence of God,
as of any event contradicting the attested constants.

The first question we must treat is thus as follows: what
founds my adhesion to the necessity of laws, and thereby
my refusal of any possible event's contradicting them?
Now, this problem is well-known since it is precisely the
question posed by Hume concerning the rational justification of our
belief in causal necessity. We are consequently confronted once
more by this question, but - let us note well, for this is
the speculative interest of the matter - we must tackle it
'backwards' in relation to its traditional treatment.

Let us explain. The usual way of posing the question
of causal necessity proceeds with the interrogation as
formulated by Hume himself, and which can be stated
as follows: it being understood that we believe in the
necessity of laws, can this belief be founded in reason, so
as to guarantee that laws will be in the future what they
are today, all other circumstances being equal? The aporia
encountered by Hume consists in the fact that neither logic
nor experience are able to offer any such justification.
For, on one hand, there is nothing contradictory in the
observable constants being modified in the future; and,
on the other, experience teaches us only about the present
and the past, not the future. So that the supposed necessity
of natural laws becomes an enigma since the Principle of
Sufficient Reason cannot be effectively applied to it: We
cannot rationally discover any reason why laws should be

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Meillassoux - Spectral Dilemma

so rather than otherwise, that is to say why they should
remain in their current state rather than being arbitrarily
modified from one moment to the next.

Now, our perspective is the inverse of Hume's: for
we propose on the contrary to start out from the effective
possibility that natural laws might break down without reason,
in favour of an eventality incompatible with them. For we
pose the following question: since Hume has convinced us
that we could a priori (that is to say without contradiction)
conceive a chaotic modification of natural laws, why not
have confidence in the power of thought, which invites us
to posit the contingency of the laws of nature, rather than in
experience, in which alone the presentation of the apparent
fixity of observable constants finds its source? Why
extrapolate the empirical fixity of laws into a belief in their
necessity, rather than adhering to the intellection of a radical
Chaos which Hume has masterfully, if implicitly, revealed
to us? Why not, in other words, absolutise the failure of
the Principle of Sufficient Reason, by maintaining that the
meaning of that absence of reason for laws which we run
up against in the Humean problem is not an incapacity of
thought to discover such reasons, but a capacity of thought
to intuit a priori, in the real itself, the effective absence of the
reason of things as laws, and the possibility of their being
modified at any moment? It would be a question of making
of contingency the absolute property of every being, laws
as well as things - a property which a redefined reason, a
reason emancipated, from the Principle of Sufficient Reason, would
take as its task to conceive and to describe. Thus the idea
presents itself of an inverted, rather than a reversed Platonism,
a Platonism which would maintain that thought must free
itself from the fascination for the phenomenal fixity of laws,

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COLLAPSE IV

so as to accede to a purely intelligible Chaos capable of
destroying and of producing, without reason, things and
the laws which they obey.

Does this mean that we will have resolved Hume's
problem when we have posited the contingency of laws
rather than their necessity? No, indeed, for we are then
confronted by another problem, in the form of an objection
expressing the reason why our thesis does not appear
credible, namely: If laws could be modified without reason
at any moment, it would be extraordinarily improbable if this
possibility were never to manifest itself. And in truth, if
matter could incessantly, in the least of its parts, follow
innumerable different laws, the disorder would be such
that there would not even be manifestation. This argument,
as we know, is the very core of Kant's transcendental
deduction: the contingency of laws is incompatible with
the constitutive stability of representation. But our task is
more precise now: to resolve the reformulated Humean
problem, we must refute such an inference, from the contingency of
laws to a frequent, even frenetic, disorder, whether of matter or of
representation; we must establish that the manifest stability
of laws does not demand that we maintain their necessity.
Such is the first problem - which is far from being the last -
that the spectral dilemma obliges us to resolve if we would
recuse the impossibility of a counter-natural event coming
to pass. From this point on, God must be thought as the
contingent, but eternally possible, effect of a Chaos unsubordinated to
any law.

Let us agree to call speculative all philosophies which
accord to thought the capacity to accede to an absolute, and
metaphysical all philosophies which ground themselves on a
modality of the Principle of Sufficient Reason to accede to

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Meillassoux - Spectral Dilemma

the absolute. All metaphysics, according to this reading,
cannot but be speculative; however, not all speculation
is necessarily fated to be metaphysical. For speculation
which founded itself on the radical falsity of the Principle of
Sufficient Reason would describe an absolute which would
not constrain things to being thus rather than otherwise,
but which would constrain them to being able not to be
how they are. We can therefore formulate the conclusion
at which we wished to arrive at, namely that the existential
resolution of the spectral dilemma passes by way of the speculative, but
non-metaphysical, resolution of Hume's problem.

A few words, to conclude, on the inexistent god. How
- according to what principles of investigation - might one
attempt to designate its nature, once the latter is defined as
a contingent effect of Chaos? On this point, we must agree
to pose again, outside the transcendental field, a Kantian-
style question: What am I permitted to hope for, now that
I can hope? What is a god which would be once more
desirable, lovable, worthy of imitation? If one supposes
granted the real eventuality of emergences in rupture with
the present laws of nature, what will be the most singular
possible divinity, the most interesting, the most 'noble' in a
sense (paradoxically) close to Nietzsche's? Must this future
and immanent god be personal, or consist in a 'harmony',
a becalmed community of living, of dead, and of reborn?
We believe that precise responses to these questions can
be envisaged, and that they determine an original regime
of thought, in rupture with both atheism and theology:
a divinology, yet to be constituted, through which will be
fabricated, perhaps, new links between men and those who
haunt them.

275

276

COLLAPSE IV

Horror Temporis

Benjamin Noys

In his 'Notes on Writing Weird Fiction' (1937) Lovecraft
wrote that time played such a large part in his fiction because
he found it 'the most profoundly dramatic and grimly
terrible thing in the universe'. 1 On the one hand, the horror
of time is not simply the trifling matter of individual human
finitude, but rather the recognition of scientific statements
concerning cosmic timescales that precede and exceed the
existence of humanity and life itself. Unlike Engels, who
hoped against hope for future relief from the second law of
thermodynamics, 2 Lovecraft only foresaw future extinction.

1. H. P. Lovecraft, 'Notes on Writing Weird Fiction' (1937). Malamndra. 2003. At
http://www.geocities.com/soho/cafe/1131/14notesen.htm

2. As Engels puts it, in the vein of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land (1912):
Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and
die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will
no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the
human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer

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A science that produces time as indifferent to humanity is
thus the source of the horror temporis. On the other hand,
he writes that his stories are concerned with achieving the
'suspension or violation' of natural laws in order to probe
'the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight
and analysis.' This suspension seems to promise an oneiric
mysticism in the Dunsanian vein that escapes 'the prison-
house of the known' into the 'enchanted lands of incredible
adventures and infinite possibilities'. Thus, we seem to be
left with the paradox of a horror based on science that
threatens to proceed through an insipid anti-scientific
mysticism. But Lovecraft's actual solution, at least in his
great texts, was more inventive: the suspension of natural
laws would produce a new materialism which liberates us
into the experience of the horror of time in its subtraction
from any law and any relation. 3

find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic
life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in
deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and
at last fall into it. Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead
of the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members,
only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal space.
And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the
other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable
island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the earth while
there is a living human eye to receive it.

And when such a solar system has completed its life history and succumbs to
the fate of all that is finite, death, what then? Will the sun's corpse roll on for all
eternity through infinite space, and all the once infinitely diverse, differentiated
natural forces pass for ever into one single form of motion, attraction? 'Or' - as
Secchi asks - 'do forces exist in nature which can re-convert the dead system into
its original state of an incandescent nebula and re-awake it to new life? We do
not know'.

Dialectics of Mature (1883) Introduction'. At

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch01.htm

3. This obviously indexes the work of Quentin Meillassoux, in particular his paper
'Subtraction and Contraction', Collapse III (2007): 63-107. Through a reading of

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Noys - Horror Temporis

The question is of 'the mode of manifestation' of this
operation, which Lovecraft regards as requiring an 'object
embodying the horror and phenomena observed'. His fiction
works through images of these objects, through the domain
of the imaginary, but only through the impasse where the
imaginary touches upon the real. If scientific laws provide
him with the final regulative guarantee of consistency then
his fiction probes the inconsistency of 'shattered natural
law' and the inconsistency of the object. To achieve this
effect requires the gradual purification of the object from the
regulation of representation. In the case of time this process
can be traced in the last of his great texts: 'The Shadow Out
of Time' (1936). 4 Here it is a matter of what kind of object
constitutes the shadow that falls from the outside - not a
mystical outside of completed alterity the tout Autre, but a
material 'outside' which does not respond to the effect of
law or to any correlation or relation to humanity.

That outside is named in the opening of the story as
the 'seething vortex of time'. The preliminary image of
the vortex obviously derives from Poe and his use of the
vortex in the form of a whirlpool in a number of his stories.

Bergson and Deleuze Meillassoux approaches a subtractive thinking of matter as 'an
infinite madness' in which,
we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the
earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light - of the
earth and of elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant - like an atrocious
screaming tumult of all things, traversing us continuously and instantaneously.
(104)
Can we suggest that this is often the state of the Lovecraftian hero at the end of many
of the stories? Can we also suggest, alongside Meillassoux, that this indicates the
ruination of philosophy in 'absolute communication', the point at which Lovecraft
indicates the collapse of the philosophical in chaos?

4. H. P. Lovecraft 'The Shadow Out of Time' in H. P. Lovecraft, The H. P. Lovecraft
Omnibus 3: The Haunter of the Dark and Other Tiles (London: Panther Books, 1985),
464-544.

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Take, for example, this description from 'A Descent into
the Maelstrom' (1841): 'the interior surface of a funnel vast
in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose perfectly
smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for
the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around.' In
this case we have an image taken from nature that embodies
a turbulent flow in excess of mechanistic materialism. This
is nature itself as what Lacan would call antiphysis - a 'rotten',
chaotic, fractured nature. Lovecraft radicalises this impasse
of nature by not containing it within nature as an emergent
fracture. Instead, as the 'seething vortex of time', the vortex
becomes the chaotic space of the emergence of nature itself:
the Outside. We no longer have a confined phenomena, a
hole in the imaginary through which the real surges. Lacan
would state that while the real does not lack anything, it is
full of holes and one can even make a vacuum in it.

The mode of manifestation proceeds through a
number of supplementary objects of horror that embody
the shadow that falls from outside. In the first instance the
shadow falls on the story's narrator, Nathaniel Peaslee,
when he suffers from a strange experience of amnesia
between 1908 and 1913 (the same period as Lovecraft's
own nervous breakdown) . As the narrative unfolds it soon
becomes evident that Peaslee had his mind exchanged with
a member of the Great Race - alien beings that lived on
the earth fifty million years before mankind and that have
mastered the secret of time. When Peaslee returns to his
body he finds that 'my conception of time - my ability to
distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness
- seemed subtly disordered'. This disorder of time can be
explained as a result of the transference or interference by
the Great Race, but also by the impact of his realisation that

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Noys - Horror Temporis

for these alien creatures 'there was no such thing as time in
its humanly accepted sense.' During the period in which
Lovecraft was writing, Heidegger and Bergson were trying
to produce new concepts of time that would correlate, in
however attenuated a fashion, with the human experience
of time. What Lovecraft suggests is the detachment of
time from any relation to humanity - proceeding without
philosophy towards the real.

This, though, is only the first object of horror temporis.
Despite the monstrous nature of these creatures, Lovecraft's
narrator evinces considerable sympathy for the Great Race
and their project to gather knowledge, and secure their
future survival, by this process of mind exchange. The
organisation of their social system by 'a sort of fascistic
socialism' dominated by a clerisy implies a kind of cosmic
Keynesian planner-State of the kind Lovecraft himself
obviously approved. The crisis that State has to manage is
the threat of the elder beings - the second object of horror.
These 'half polypous, utterly alien entities' are only partly
material (here we see the purification of the object) and
dominated the earth six hundred million years ago. The
Great Race would subdue these creatures beneath the cities
they had built and which were then occupied by the Great
Race. The old mole of alien class struggle had literally gone
underground only to sporadically erupt in revolutions
'shocking beyond all description'. The final flight of the
Great Race to new bodies would be caused by the 'final
successful irruption of the elder beings'. 5

This little allegory of 1917 and the New Deal requires
little deciphering, especially after China Mieville's reading

5. H. P. Lovecraft 'The Shadow Out of Time', 502, 504, 505, 506.

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COLLAPSE IV

of At the Mountains of Madness (1931). 6 The layering of these
two objects of horror can be found in Peaslee's exploration
of the ancient city of the Great Race in the Australian
desert, as he searches for definitive proof of his abduction.
The city itself forms an abyss, parallel to the horror of
the vortex, with its 'vast chain of aeon-dead black gulfs'.
Within the abyssal city, however, there is a further abyss.
This is one of the prisons of the 'elder things' : a 'downward
aperture' open and 'yawning unguarded down to abysses
past imagination'. Returning back past the open trap door
Peaslee stumbles and hears the resultant noise answered by
'a shrill, whistling sound, like nothing else on earth, and
beyond any adequate verbal description' - the sound of
the elder beings. These 'tides of abomination surging up
through the cleft itself' 7 fill-out the abyss or vortex with a
material presence. Unlike At the Mountains of Madness we are
not greeted with the appearance of these creatures; instead
they remain signalled only by sound.

Therefore this filling-out of the abyss is withdrawn and
we are faced with a further layer of the shadow. The alien
whistling of the creatures calls up another fear, the fear
of being 'engulfed in a pandemoniac vortex of loathsome
sound and utter, materially tangible blackness'. 8 The
'materiality' here is the subtractive or purified materiality
of the vortex of seething time - the seething blackness of
chaos. Recall 'The Music of Erich Zann' (1921), 9 in which
the mad music of Zann is played to ward off something

6. China Mieville, 'Introduction' in H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (New
York: The Modern Library, 2005), xi-xxv.

7. H. P. Lovecraft 'The Shadow Out of Time', 526, 529, 534, 539, 541.

8. Ibid, 541.

9. H. P. Lovecraft 'The Music of Erich Zann' in Omnibus 3, 335-345.

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Noys - Horror Temporis

worse: 'the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space
alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of
anything on earth.' 10 The narrative had earlier made clear
how even the horror of the elder beings is finite; the Great
Race knows that these creatures 'were slowly weakening
with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be
quite dead in the time of the post-human beetle race which
the fleeing minds would tenant'. 11 No consciousness, alien
or human, subtends the seething vortex of time.

Sound is then only the signal for the definitive rupture
of the musica universalis - and the revelation of the real
qua chaos - compact but full of holes. But this effect is
withdrawn. The final 'shattering' revelation of Lovecraft's
narrative is the - by now for the reader, entirely predictable
- recovery by the narrator of a text from the depths of the
alien city written in his own hand. This forms the definitive
proof that 'there lies upon this world of man a shocking and
incredible shadow out of time'. In this revelation we witness
the retraction of the horror back towards the constraints of
the object. Lovecraft himself remained dissatisfied with the
story and refused to type it up. If every critical reading is
a kind of rewriting, and often, as in this case, something of
the expression of the text we desired rather than the text we
have, then what I desire is that 'terrible thing': a fiction of
the 'seething vortex of time'.

I, Nathaniel Peaslee, have found that last proof of my otherness
written in my own hand. But then this textual proof serves
to keep me guarded as one of the chosen of the Great Race.
I is another, another subject. We might all be doomed but I,

10. Ibid, 3434.

11. H. P. Lovecraft 'The Shadow Out of Time', 506.

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COLLAPSE IV

Nathaniel Peaslee, have had the honour of being chosen as a
great mind who will be recorded.

Something, however, whispers in poor Nathaniel's ear:

What about the shadow out of time? You presume that the
shadow comes from outside. You suggest, implicitly, some
stable and material outside that forms the flipside of existent
reality. I come with the good bad news, the shadow out of
time does not exist outside time, it is time. Time itself is the
shadowy vortex of a 'matter' that forms nothing and has no
need of you, anyone or anything else. Good night Nathaniel
and good luck.

284 285

COLLAPSE IV

Drawings

Todosch

p.290, p.297 (detail), p.306, p.313 (detail), p.320.
All Ink on Paper, 50 x 32 cm.

286

COLLAPSE IV

Being and Slime:

The Mathematics of Protoplasm

in Lorenz Oken's 'Physio-Philosophy'

lain Hamilton Grant

It is a daring act of reason to set humanity free and to abstract the shock
of the objective world; yet the venture cannot miscarry, since man becomes
greater to the degree he knows himself and his strength.
Schelling 1

A philosophy or ethics without a philosophy of nature is a non-thing a

bare contradiction, like a flower without a stem.

Oken 2

1. Introduction: The Non-Thing or, On the Forms
Occurring in Contemporary Philosophy

The fate of post-Kantian philosophy depends on
whether the 'shock of the objective world' can be overcome
by self-knowledge, on the actuality of the 'shock of the
actual'. 3 A seismic chain runs through transcendental-
ism's subjugation of earthquakes to epistemology, a
vulcanism poignantly articulated in the objections of
the cosmologist Johann Heinrich Lambert to Kant's
relegation of time to an a priori form of inner intuition:
1 If changes are real, then time is real [...] If time is unreal, then no
change can be real. 1 ' This is the shock of physics shattering the

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COLLAPSE IV

insularity of transcendental subjectivity, demonstrating the
stakes of the modal investigation of epistemogenesis with
which the transcendental philosophy attempted to replace
ontology.

Schelling's account of transcendentalism as a 'daring
act of reason' clearly articulates the substitution of ethics
for ontology that lies at its core. The accuracy of this
diagnosis is certainly revealed in transcendental philoso-
phy's restriction of reality to the scope of possible intuition,

1. Schelling, Oftlielas the Principle of Philosophy* in ScheWngs sdmmtliche Werke, ed. K.F.A.
Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J.G. Cotta'scher Verlag, 1856-1861), 14 vols,
cited as SW1-U. Here SW1: 157.

2. Lorenz Oken, Elements of Pkysiophilosopliy, Alfred Tulk's translation, which I have
occasionally modified, of Oken's Lehrbuch der Naturphihsophie* 3 vols (Jena: Friedrich
Frommann, 1809, 1810, 1811, 3' d edition, Zurich 1843). References throughout will
be to Elements followed by the section numbers common both to Tulk's work and
the recent republication of the Lehrbuch as volume 2 of the newly published Okens
gesammelte Werke* ed. Thomas Bach, Olaf Breidbach and Dietrich von Engelhardt
(Weimar: Hermann Bohlhaus Nachfolger, 2007). On Oken, see Michael T Ghiselin,
'Lorenz Oken', in Thomas Bach and Olaf Breidbach, eds., Naturphihsophie nach
Schelling. (Schellingiana 17) (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann Holzboog, 2005),
433-57; Olaf Breidbach and Michael T Ghiselin, 'Lorenz Oken's Naturphihsophie in
Jena, Paris and London' in History aiui Philosophy of the Life Sciences 24 (2002), 219-47;
and Olaf Breidbach, Hansjoachim Fliedner and Klaus Ries, eds. Lorenz Oken. Ein
politisc/ier Naturphihsoph (Weimar: Hermann Bohlhaus Nachfolger, 2001).

3. Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingcn, as cited by Hegel in the Rezensionai aus den
Jalirbuchem fur wissenscluftliclie Kritik in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Werke ed. Eva
Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979),
vol.11: 215. Interestingly, Hegel is here discussing the relation between actuality and
freedom.

4. Lambert, Letter to Kant of October 13 th 1770 in Kants gesammelte Schrften (Berlin:
Konigliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1902ff), cited Ak. Here Ak.X:
107 (italics in original). Lambert is responding to § 14 of On the Form a?id Prinaphs of
the Sensible and Intelligible World* where Kant argued that 'although time, posited in
itself and absolutely, would be an imaginary being [...], it is a condition, extending to
infinity, of intuitive representation for all possible objects of the senses' {AkW: 401;
1992a: 395). Kant echoes Lambert's question and his response in the first Critique:
'Time is certainly something real, namely, the real form of inner intuition' (A36-6/
B53-4).

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Grant - Being and Slime / Todosch - Drawings

but its terms are more overtly displayed in the unstable
dualism of teleology and mechanism in the third Critique.
The dualism is unstable, because despite appearances, it
is not only a dispute about natural causality (although this
is certainly part of it), but outlines the procedure whereby
physical grounds are reduced to the inscrutable abjecta of
reason's ultimately moral actualisation. This procedure
consists in (a) maintaining the phenomenal indifference of
moral and natural purposes in keeping with the constraints
placed by the first Critique on theoretical reason; while (b)
extending the authority of practical over theoretical reason,
in keeping with the second Critique; and thereby (c) rejecting
ontology for an ethicised phenomenology. It should be
noted, moreover, that the logical form of this procedure is
self-reinforcing: (a) + (b) = (c) = (a) + (b). We shall call it
the ethical process.

The claim of this paper is that this ethical process is
as untenable as it is ubiquitous. It is point (c) that makes
it recognisably ubiquitous, although usually (not always)
without the string of reasons (a) and (b) that establish it.
It is untenable because reason must now affirm ethical
grounding as the absence of grounds, or the absence of grounds
as ethical grounding. The ethical process is the principal
element of the philosophy of what Oken, above, calls the
'bare contradiction, the non-thing'.

In the equation of 'bare contradiction' and 'non-thing',
it is clear that Oken considers logical forms to entail
ontological consequences: that a bare contradiction is a
non-thing. This is in complete contradiction to the verdict
of Hegel's Philosophy of Mature, where he dismisses Oken
as practising a 'mere formalism' comprising nothing but
'assertions' common to 'the philosophy of nature of his

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time'. 5 In contrast, what the geological Naturphilosoph Henrik
Steffens called Oken's 'hard, insurmountable realism' 6
consists, in part, in a realism with regard to grounds. The
core philosophical problem to which Oken's Naturphil-
osophie is addressed is consequently to determine 'how
something derived its existence from nothing'. 7 As will
become apparent, the 'nothing' from which 'somethings'
always derive their existence is the mathematical nothing,
the zero. Thus, Oken's 'generative history of the world' 8
consists entirely in demonstrating the repeated ontological
consequences of what he calls, emphasising this generative
operation, the mathes-is issuing from Zero. Thus, the formal
reason of an existent is = the real ground of existence = 0.
The question is whether the zero is always the same, i.e.
whether is always = 0, or whether, for instance, in the
domain of biology, the is slimy.

The story is often told that the immediate post-Kan-
tian reaction consists in the 'organicist turn', with Goethe,
Schelling and the Naturphilosophen cited as evidence. While
it is certainly true that the post-Kantian philosophers and
naturalists attempted to resolve Kant's dualism by way
of organic or self-organizing causality, this story remains

5. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, trans A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1970) §346, ^usati. There are moments in the Elements, notably its first section, that
seem to ratify Hegel's assessment: 'Philosophy, as the science which embraces the
principles of the universe or world, is only a logical, which may perhaps conduct
us to the real, conception.' Hegel ignores countervailing propositions: 'what holds
good of mathematical principles must also hold good of the principles of nature'
{Elements 67).

6. Henrik Steffens, Schrifien alt and neu Vol.1. (Breslau 1821: 81), cited in Hinrich
Knittermeyer Schelling mid die romantischc Schule (Munchen: Ernst Reinhardt, 1928),
192.

7. Elements, 10.

8. Ibid.,\\.

291

COLLAPSE IV

philosophically inadequate. In brief, the reasons for the
insufficiency of this story are (i) that it segregates philosophy
from nature, making the former merely the corollary of the
latter; and (ii) that by making the naturalisation of teleology
versus cognitively insuperable intentionality (the problem
of 'access') into the only significant problem to which the
Idealists contribute, it (iii) leaves the problem of the forms
of realism pursued in the long aftermath of Kantianism,
entirely unaddressed. This essay will therefore take Oken's
Mathesis as a particular case study in the pursuit of a post-
Kantian realism reducible neither to dogmatism nor to the
ethical process, a pursuit that remains as insistent today as
it did two hundred years ago.

2. Physio-Philosophy as the System of the Generation
of the World

The Elements of Physio-Philosophy {Lehrbuch der Naturphiloso-
phie) is a summative work that synthesises Oken's previous
researches. Since his Preface to the Lehrbuch provides a retro-
spective of this works, and since, like most of the Naturphi-
losophen, Oken remains as scorned as he is ignored, we will
introduce the main points of Oken's system through his
own bibliographical commentary.

Oken's first work, the Outline of Nature Philosophy, 'theory
of the Senses and the Animal Classification based Thereupon (1802),
sets out from the thesis that 'the animal classes are virtually
nothing else than a representation of the sense-organs', a
position by which, he states, he 'still abides' in the Elements
(xi). This is notable both in its attempt to infer a system
from physiological particulars, a realism that will survive,
just as it is inverted, in the Elements; and in the structural role
it allots to the theory of recapitulation, further developed
and exemplified in this gloss of the theory as propounded

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Grant - Being and Slime / Todosch - Drawings

in On the Significance of the Cranial Bone (1807):

[. . .] the head is nothing other than a vertebral column [. . .] [just
as] the maxillae are nothing else but repetitions of arms and
feet, the teeth being their nails [. . .] 9

This 'vertebral theory of the skull', over the discovery
of which Oken disputed with Goethe, 10 not only 'supposed
a community between the human skull and that of the
lower vertebrates', but extended beyond the organic into
the mineral, geological and cosmogenic domains, carrying
the 'law of serial repetition [...] to ludicrous lengths' in
Oken, according to some. 11 While such a law must lose in
determinacy what it gains in extent, the principle behind
it is simple: that no product of nature arises in isolation
from all other products, each being dependent on others,
'tak[ing] its starting-point from below', as Oken notes. 12
How far below, however, must research plunge in order to
locate the basal, serially repeated element? Writing retro-
spectively in 1846, this is what the neurophysiologist Jacob
Henle called the 'genetic method', which had as its goal 'to
identify the simple type of a given structure and to trace
its progressive elaboration'. 13 Where the genetic researcher
is in possession of the fully elaborated organ, the task is

9. Elements, xii.

10. As notably discussed by Hegel in his Philosophy of Nature, §354 Ziisatr. 'Oken,
to whom Goethe had communicated the treatise [Chi Morphology 1785], paraded its
ideas as his own in a programme he wrote on the subject, and so gained the credit
for them.'

11. Edwin Clarke and L.S. Jacyna, Nineteenth Century Origins of Neuroscicntific
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 42.

12. Elements, zxiii.

13. Cited in Clark and Jacyna (1987), 21, 43.

293

COLLAPSE IV

simplified; insofar as the basal element of any living organi-
sation is to be encountered within the domain of the biotic,
the task becomes simpler still: to find the basal type of all
life.

However, if in principle there are no independent
products in nature, then the prospect of an end to the genetic
typing of any natural product is not to be found in the part,
but rather in the whole. Oken's next work will accordingly
transform the search for nature's basal elements into the
search for 'the nature of nature', 14 or metaphysics.

Combining the results of the Outline and Significance,
Oken's On the Universe as a Continuation of the Sensory System
(1808) argued 'that the Organism is nothing other than a
combination of all the Universe's activities within a single
individual body' and that 'World and Organism are one
in kind, and do not stand merely in harmony with each
other'. 15 The last clause here indicates an important thesis
regarding the theory of recapitulation, which does not
assert that there merely exists a contingent 'harmony' or
phenomenal similarity between parallel series (e.g. world-
generation and speciation) that remain of fundamentally
different natural orders, but rather that all of nature is
involved in the generation of any part of it. Moreover, as
evinced by the work's title, Oken is no longer concerned,
as he was the Outline, to derive merely formal devices from
physiological givens, but rather to assert that this structure
is really instantiated in the universe as such. Accordingly,
Oken extended his systematising attention to the elements
of physics in First Ideas towards a Theory of Light, Darkness,
Colour and Heat (1808), where each of these phenomena

14. Novalis, Werke 2: Die Ckristenheit oder Europa mid andere philosophische Schrifien, ed.
Rolf Toman (K61n: K6nemann, 1996), 440.

15. Elements, xii.

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Grant - Being and Slime / Todosch - Drawings

are derived from tensions, antagonisms and motions in the
aether, constituting a 'primitive field theory', 16 and in the
Natural System of Ores (1809), where mineral particulars are
considered for the first time.

While the resultant dynamics fulfilled the post-Kan-
tian brief for physics established especially by Franz von
Baader's Ideas On Rigidity and Fluidity (1792), Apolph Karl
August von Eschenmayer's Propositions from the Metaphysics of
Nature applied to Chemical and Medical Objects and Attempt to
Derive the Laws ofMagietism A Priori from the Propositions of the
Metaphysics of Nature (both 1797), Oken had also to integrate
the phenomena of life into this universal physics. While it
is only in the Elements that this is achieved, Oken's contribu-
tion towards it - the theory of 'primal slime' or protoplasm
- was first advanced in On Generation (1805), which argued

[...] that all organic beings originate from [...] the infusorial
mass, or the protoplasm [Urschleim] from whence all larger
organisms fashion themselves or are evolved. Their production
is therefore nothing else than a regular agglomeration of [...]
mucus vesicles or points [Schleimpunkte], which first form
themselves by their union or combination into particular
species. 1 '

Since naturephilosophy is to be 'the generative
history of the world', 18 rather than that of biological
individuals alone, the Elements undertakes to synthesise
the sensory, cosmogonic, geological, embryological and

16. Pierce C. Mullen, 'The romantic as scientist: Lorenz Oken', Studies in Romanticism
16 (1977): 381-99, 388.

17. Elements, xi-xii.

18. Ibid., 11.

295

COLLAPSE IV

Q

philosophical systems into a single, self-recapitulating series.
The question arises as to how primary the 'primal slime' is.
Written prior to the cosmogonic synthesis of Of the Universe,
Oken's programme in On Generation has not yet undertaken
the transition to from the physics to the metaphysics of
nature. Thus, as briefly digested as the Elements is vast
(numbering 3652 propositions), Oken describes its project
as finally

[...] bringfing] these different doctrines into mutual connexion,
and to show, forsooth, that the Mineral, Vegetable and Animal
classes are not to be arbitrarily arranged in accordance with
single or isolated characters, but to be based upon the cardinal
organs or anatomical systems, from which a firmly established
number of classes must of necessity result; moreover, that each
of these classes commences or takes its starting-point from
below, and consequently that all of them pass parallel to each
other. 19

Yet even here Oken holds out a physicalist solution to
the genetic problem, noting that a parallelism between the
classes make it possible 'to prove that they by no means
form a single ascending series'. 20 Although the primacy of
primal slime may thus yet be safeguarded, how the Elements'
project is to be achieved is set out in the opening sections
of the work, which introduce the naturephilosophical terms
of reference. Amongst the most important of these is the
actual and logical priority of natural ground:

Naturephilosophy is the first, philosophy of mind, the second:
the former, therefore, is the ground and foundation of the latter,

19. Elements, xiii.
20. Ibid.

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COLLAPSE IV

for nature is antecedent to the human mind. [...] Without
naturephilosophy, therefore, there is no philosophy of mind,
any more than a flower is present without a stem, or an edifice
without a foundation. 21

Moreover, since naturephilosophy 'has to show how,
and in accordance indeed with what laws, the material took
its origin', it follows that history forms a single temporal
series from the development of matter to particular natures
to mind. The formal reason = real ground of existence
consists in the various solutions to the problem of 'how
something derived its existence from nothing'. 22

The other element, then, is Zero, the nothing, and it
is introduced in the Elements for the first time as paralleling
the Urschleim in biology. In what sense, however, 'parallel'?
Are the biological and the mathematical parallel and thus
independent, or does everything depend on 'what is below
it'? The problem of the relative and mobile primacies
attaching to the various basal types running throughout
Oken's system is that Zero is the equilibrium point in
Oken's polar philosophy of nature, and is so dominant
that it led Steffens to describe Oken's 'insurmountable
realism' as complemented only by an 'ideal element' that
is 'entirely negative', a view Knittermeyer endorses. 23 The
basal Zero - 'Oken's most pervasive principle' - states that
'all development proceeds along the same path by adding
elements to an original nothingness', a law that 'holds
for human ontogeny, the historical sequence of species,

21. Element 15-16, t.m.

22. Ibid, 10.

23. Schelling und die romantische Schule (op.cit.), 192.

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Grant - Being and Slime / Todosch - Drawings

the evolution of the earth itself'. 24 This account certainly
follows from the irreversible priority Oken attaches to
Nature over Mind; but the problem remains: either the Zero
is the mtrdy formal element Hegel accused Oken's naturephi-
losophy as consisting in, in which case 'The universe' is
not 'the reality of mathematics'; 25 or 'existence derives from
nothing' and Slime is not primal. The Okenian solution to
the genetic problem therefore consists in a struggle between
Nothing and Slime.

3. Zero or Slime? The Elements of the Elements
and the groundedness of the ground

The Elements outlines its system in sections 18-21 of its
'Introduction'. The 'generative history of the world' divides
into three parts:

1. Mathesis (of the whole),

from which stem (a) Hylogeny and (b) Theogony, or the

generative philosophy of matter and mind;

2. Ontology (of the singular),

which follows the generation of nature from Mathesis, and from

which stem (a) Cosmogony and (b) Stoichogeny; and

3. Biology (oftlie whole in the singular),

which recapitulates the generation of Hylogeny, Theogony and

Ontology in embryogenesis.

Mathesw - the actions of mathematics, 'the only true,

24. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phytogeny (Cambridge MA: ]
1977), 44, 40.

25. Elements 2.

ellknap Harvard,

299

COLLAPSE IV

the primary, the universal science' 26 - subdivides in turn
into the theories of material totalities or Hylogeny, a 'rather
primitive field-theory' 27 comprising aether, light and heat;
and of immaterial totalities or Pneumatogeny, a Theogony
comprising God and Nothing. Ontology divides into
Cosmogony, or the emergence of the cosmic bodies, and
Stoichogeny, or how the heavenly bodies 'divide themselves
further [...] into the elements'. Biology, concerned with
'the whole in singulars [which] is the living or Organic [...]
divides into Organogeny, Phytosophy and / 7posophy , . 2S

Two things concerning Oken's conception of Biology
are immediately apparent. The first is that it is no longer
predicated, as was Oken's procedure in the Outline (1802),
on a particular kind of being whose contours are given in
nature, but rather on a particular stage in the development
of structural complexity involving God, Nothing and Matter,
or mathematics, singulars and substance; that is, the whole
of nature. Since the whole is the self-division of God,
Nothing and Matter, and the singular is the elemental,
hylogenetic singular attained and actualized through these
divisions; and since further it is articulated primarily
by mathematics, then the true object of Biology is the
mathematics of these self-divisions as actualised in living
somethings. This is the fork in Biological science that leads
to the theory of the Primal Slime (Urschleim) and its mani-
festation in Slime Points {Schleimpunkte) . The theory of slime
which forms the oozing ground of Oken's 'physio-philos-
ophy' is ultimately therefore a 'mathematics endowed with

26. Ibid, 24-5

27. Mullen (1977) Loc.cit.

28. Elenwits, 21.

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Grant - Being and Slime / Todosch - Drawings

substance', 29 or the product of the mathetic-ontogenetic
process; the biogenetic process then 'takes its starting point'
from the 'infusorial mass' or 'primal slime' below, which it
divides into the innumerable 'mucus vesicles [Schleimpunkte]'
that are the 'primal constituent parts of [this] organic mass'.
The production of complex singulars (individuals) consists
therefore in the 'agglomeration of infusoria' up to the
level of species. 30 Biology is therefore the science of the
production of individuals that has as its basis the science of
the production of wholes.

Secondly, if the system that supports this account of
the organic is a true system, that is, if the philosophy of
nature is not merely a reflection upon nature, but rather
'the generative history of the world', 31 a world that articulates
'mathematical propositions' as much as it generates 'natural
things', 32 then it follows that Biology is no isolated science
of abstracted particulars, but rather concerns the develop-
mental singularities by which the mathematicising cosmos
is actualised. Hence Oken's insistence that

Natural History is not a closed department of human
knowledge, but presupposes numerous other sciences, such
as Anatomy, Physiology, Chemistry and Physics, with even
Medicine, Geography and History. 33

Biology becomes the science it must when and only
when the totality of the sciences - of wholes, singulars,

29. Ibid, 26.

30. Ibid,xii.

31. Ibid, 11.

32. Ibid, 30.

33. Ibid, xiv.

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COLLAPSE IV

and singulars-in-wholes - recovers the entirety of science
as such. This means that Biology recapitulates Mathesis,
just as Oken's categories suggest: of the Whole, and of
the Whole in the Singular. The one science of the whole is
mathematics, the language of ontogenesis. From this second
perspective, Oken derives what many, including Hegel,
deride as the 'empty formalism' of his system, a formalism
articulated around an irreducibly ontogenetic element: the
'oscillating Zero', or God: 'God is = + -'. 34 The problem
of the relation between the multiplicity of sciences and the
'universal science' arises starkly: either there is one universal
science to which all others are reducible, or Mathesis, the
theory of the whole, has no claim to universality, and does
not therefore articulate ontogeny. In short: what is the relation
between the Primal Slime and the £ero? Oken's proposed solution
is: mathematics is the universal science that generates, inter-
connects, and necessitates all the others. The 'wavering
Zero' is the generative core of being and slime.

The problem of priority is a problem for a metaphysi-
cally realist natural history precisely because the theory of
recapitulation, considered causally, abolishes linear time.
Whenever there arise claims to priority (the primal Zero

34. Elements, 99. Knittermeyer puts Oken's case economically and concisely: 'God
is the father, the generator, but himself ungenerated, transformed into the plus
and the minus and yet always remains himself as the existent nothing [das wesende
Nichts]. God is the son who goes forth from the father into fmitude, and he is the
mind that takes fmitude back, in turn, to the origin and reproduces the "mental
bond" with the generating origin. As the first, this divine acting is the 'primary rest
[UrruJie~\\ the "wavering and resting point in the universe", the "never appearing
and yet ubiquitously present". As the second he is eternal ponentiation and hence,
corresponding to the number series 1 + 2 + . . . + n, the creator of the temporal series.
As the third, however, God is he who takes back the finite [being] released into the
restless time effecting motion and life, into the whole and binds it into him in all-filling
space. The formless oscillation of life here receives form and integument. The divine
brings itself closer to appearing and therefore materiality.' (Hinrich Knittermeyer,
Scfiellmg und die romantisihc Schitle. Miinchen: Ernst Reinhardt, 1928, 189).

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or the Primal Slime), Oken appears to equivocate. Having
noted therefore the priority of the philosophy of nature
over that of mind in section 15; along with the ontogenetic
dependency of the latter on the former ('nature is antecedent
to mind') in section 16; section 17 concludes not with this
serial genetic dependency, but with a 'parallelism' between
the two. One section later, however, the parallelism is
extended to the relative priorities of the one over the other.
Thus:

It will be shown in the sequel that the mental is antecedent to
nature. Naturephilosophy must, therefore, commence from the
mind. 35

Which, then, does come first - Zero or Slime? Around
what axis is the topology of nature and mind spinning?
Does mathematics remain the 'primary science', or is a
mathematical realism usurped by a realism concerning
natural history? The relation of system and history remains
at the core of the metaphysics of natural history; especially
as this project was renewed in Prigogine and Stengers new
'physiophilosophical' alliance. 36 What is seldom noted is
that this entails a natural history of metaphysics that extends
beyond the steady accumulation of form that character-
ises Hegelian history of philosophy. The natural history
of metaphysics is a physics of metaphysics, a science of the
grounds of metaphysics in nature, or a physics of ideation
as such. Although sounding more redolent of hard-nosed
contemporary eliminativists than of post-Kantian idealists,
this recognition was core to Naturphilosophen such as

35. Elements, 18.

36. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Clmos (New York: Bantam, 1984),
translation of La nouvelle alliance (Paris: Galliniard, 1979).

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COLLAPSE IV

Schelling, who characterised philosophy as 'the natural
history of mind' 37 and Troxler, who defines metaphysics as
the physics {Naturlehre) of human knowledge. 38 If nature is
necessary to generate mind, as sections 15 and 16 note,
then mind is necessary to the abstract recapitulation of
natural production in reflection, or to the recapitulation of
the mathetic whole in the biological singular. Yet Oken's
system extends beyond reflection on natural production,
since ontogenesis depends on Mathesis. The Platonic
kinship is unmistakable: 39 mathematics, or the Idea, are not
simply nominal or formal processes, but rather ontogenetic.
Just as the Phaedo argues 40 that it is because of the form of
Beauty that beautiful things exist, so Oken argues that it is
because of Mathesis that things exist, or because of Nothing
(= 0) that there are beings. That Oken inverts the causal
or physical dependency of mind on nature does indeed
stem from his characterisation of Mathesis as hylogeny and
theogony , which gives direction to the system, towards the
production of animals capable of Mathesis and therefore,
famously, of man:

Man is the summit, the crown of nature's development, and
must comprehend everything that has preceded him [while]
man is a complex of all that surrounds him, namely, of element,
mineral, plant and animal. 41

37. F.WJ. Schelling, Idem for a Philosophy of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), 30; SW2: 39.

38. Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler, Naturlehre des menschliclien Erkennens oder Metaphysik
(Hamburg: Meiner [1828] 1998).

39. As Mullen (1977: 388) notes, 'In form and to some extent in substance [the
Elements] closely resembles Plato's Ttmaeus?

40. Phaedo, lOOd.
i\. Elements, 12, 98.

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Grant - Being and Slime / Todosch - Drawings

At the very point where thinking slime affords nature
linearity, however, at the crown of its development from
elements to animals, directionality reverses. Mathesis
as theogony is concerned with the immaterial whole;
yet what is the 'immaterial'? Merely 'that which is nothing
in relation to the material', 42 just as 'God is = + -' 43 or 'the
eternal is the nothing of nature'. 44 The 'immaterial' is the
zero of material, its generative ground, just as God is that of
nature, since nothing iterated is the becoming of something.
Thus the sense in which 'something derives its existence
from nothing' 45 now becomes 'very clear'. Just as

numbers have not issued forth from zero as if they had
previously resided therein, but the zero has emerged out of
itself [...], and then it was a finite zero, a number 46

so something emerges not 'out of but rather from the acts
of 'the nothing's self-extensions: 'Zero is [...] the primary act
[and] numbers are [its] repetitions'. 47 Thus another primary
whose 'positing and negating are called realisation [which]
is a process of extension taking place in the Idea'. 48 And
this positing and negating takes place, equally, in the 'highest,
most exalted art [...] of war', 49 reducing everything to

42. Elements, 8.

43. Ibid, 99.

44. Ibid, 44.

45. Ibid, 10.

46. Ibid, 37.

47. Ibid, 55, 57.

48. Ibid, 48, 38.

49. Ibid, 3652.

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Grant - Being and Slime / Todosch - Drawings

nothing after the Napoleonic model. The nothing initiates
a ceaseless imitatio nihil amidst the extended multiplicities
formed of the infinite repetition of the primary act, while
existence resists the sink at its core.

At first sight far from satisfactory, all this wavering
Nothing leaves an ontological queasiness in place of
any principle of sufficient reason. It pervades Oken's
system, with its martial apex. For what kind of
biologist does war supercede life as the system's goal?
That the complexifications of Primal Slime here cede to the
destruction of war demonstrates that the cosmos worships
the Nothing-God. The culmination of Biology is the
destruction of individuals, which is held in check so long as
there remains something. Kant tells us, reassuringly enough,
that reality can never sink to zero; but Oken's mehylotheogony
supplants all Being with increase and decrease, each limitless.
The fragile hold of beings is secured by Slime alone - all
that ontology can hope for is Slime potentiated and negated
into and out of all things. The question thus arises is this:
is the Urschleim - or, ontically speaking, the Schleimpunkte -
negable, reducible, as well as 'potentiable'? The prospect
of the contingency of all beings issues directly from this as it
were gravitational distortion of the local spacetime of their
generation.

The question would hold no terror were the passage
from mathetic metheology to ontology secured, e.g. by a
causal or a linear-progressive process; but it is not. The
whole is not left behind by history, by the accumulation
of causes from whence emerges time; rather, it returns in
Biology. Oken's Biology is not therefore testimony to the
final discovery of a 'Newton of the blade of grass', of an
organicism to save us from the ravages of nature, but

1

307

COLLAPSE IV

only the repetition of the None-All in every generated
particular.

All directionality, whether in ideation or cosmogeny
in embryogenesis, hylogeny temporalisation or primary
Mathesis, is withdrawn in favour of the polar model that
determines the 'primitive field theory' Oken constructs
around the tensions, antitheses and motions of the aether
in the First Ideas for a Theory of Light, and which inherits and
extends the galvanic process Ritter discovered to 'constantly
accompany the animal kingdom' into the mineral, chemical
and mathetic domains along the lines suggested by the
magnetic schema, in which the zero is not primitive, but
first and last in, and the principle of, all the extensions of
its force. 50 Oken's mutiplicity of primaries - act, slime, rest,
etc. - are primary relative both to the lower nothing from
which, at ontogenetic root, they issue, and to the 'higher
zeros' that counteract them which they in turn give rise:
rest, war, act.

The polar metaphysics of nature, therefore, collapses
the axis of higher and lower, antecendence and succession,
into a field theory of polar dependency: 'The world is God
rotating' or 'a rotating globe of matter'. 51 Natural history is
always therefore relative to the mathetic zero from which its

50. The schema owes its most definitive account to Karl August Eschenmayers
Attempt to Deduce tlie Laws of Magnetic Phenomena a priori from tlie Propositions of Metaphysics
(1797), and to Schelling's reworking of it in his Exposition of my System of Philosophy
(1801). For Eschenmayer, see Jorgjantzen, 'Adolph Karl August von Eschenmayer'
in Bach and Breidbach, eds., op.cit., 153-79 and Gilles Chatelet, Les enjcux du mobile.
Mathematique, physique et philosophic (Paris: Seuil, 1993}, esp. 137-9. On Schelling's
transformation of tire magnetic schema in his so-called Identity philosophy, see Iain
Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006), 158-
82, and 'The physics of the world soul' in Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman,
eds. The Mew Schellmg (London: Continuum, 2004), 128-50.

51. Elements 142, 161.

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Grant - Being and Slime / Todosch - Drawings

objects issue, and the frame of reference is always generated
after the field that is its object. The ultimate significance
of sections 15, 16 and 18 of the Elements is therefore that
the priority of nature with respect to mind generates a
nothing in nature from which naturephilosophy begins.
Ironically, Oken's post-Kantian solutions make Lambert's
physico -critical intervention redundant by realising the fill
consequences of self-effecting processes: the elimination of history
in nature: Time is the infinite succession of numbers or the
mathematical nothings'. 52 We turn now to Oken's solutions
to his polar take on the genetic problem.

4. Okenian Solutions, and . . .

Oken's solution to the genetic problem is not what
Henle's 'student of the nervous system' might have hoped
for. Rather than identifying the 'basal element' of neuroge-
netic recapitulation, Oken resolves individuation into the
whole. Schematically:

(1) Mathesis— 3, Ontogenesis — * Biogenesis — * the production
of the whole in the singular — * Mathesis potentiated.

(2) The consequence of this is that the causal series
that ties time to change is sacrificed for a codepen-
dency relation, a reciprocity, between the elements
recapitulating the basic scheme of the whole in a
singular. The law of causality is a law of polarity',
not of time. 53 Time, Oken continues, is accordingly
'only repetition, and thus also a suppression of

52. Elements 72.

53. Ibid., 79.

309

COLLAPSE IV

[. . .] positions'. 54 Because the whole is expressed at
the apexes of individuation (Ideation and War),
Okenian ontogenesis produces irreducibly local
maps, while 'pneumatogenesis' has primally and
then derivatively multiplied them. Potentiation is
potentiation of the whole in its individuation, as
Schelling would later note of the involutive-evol-
utive process. 55

(3) If, logically, mathematics is the expression of the
whole in the individual; and if, theogonically,
'God = + - is before and after all things', then
modally only the nothing is necessary. Here,
then, we derive the central lesson of Oken's
system of nature: the contingency of all beings,
so the 'principle of sufficient reason' is satisfied
by nothing potentiated. Precisely in consequence
of this, mathematics or mehylogeny does not so
much supplant nature as generate it: by taking on
the project of the 'natural history of metaphysics',
Oken's slimy Platonic naturephilosophy has
mathetic functions accreting numbers and organs,
indifferently: 'all development', as Gould notes
of Oken's system, 'begins with a primal zero and
progresses to complexity by the successive addition
of organs in a determined sequence'. 56 The zero
accretes by self-extension in the forms of mineral,
chemical, plant and animal organs. 57

54. Ibid, 74.

55. See Schelling's Stuttgart Private Lectures (1810; SrV VIII), in Thomas Pfau, ed.
Idealism aiui the Emigame ofTlieoiy: 'Three Essays by Schelling {Albany NY: SUNY, 1994).

56. Gould, op.cit., 40.

57. Elements, 867

310

Grant - Being and Slime / Todosch - Drawings

(4) If, as we have seen, recapitulation becomes, by
virtue of (2), above, if not aionic (although Oken
occasionally makes precisely this point: 'Zero
must be endlessly self-positing, for in every
respect it is indefinite or unlimited, eternal'), 58 then
certainly achronic. It forms the logic of Idea in the
hylogenetic — » biogenetic process, and as such is
the repeated intercession of the eternal into time,
or its negation.

(5) Even anthropogenesis, so often criticised as
the 'anti-copernican' core of the post-Kantian
'restoration', accordingly suffers. No sooner is man
declared the 'highest', insofar as it is through man
that nature achieves Ideation and thus reproduces
Mathesis, than war erupts because 'the Nothing is
higher than the highest': 'the Zero, the highest'. 59
Oken therefore demonstrates that anthropogenesis
culminates neither in the humanism of finitude nor
in the ontolotheological eschatology but rather
ceaselessly repeats the mathetic mehylotheogony of the
cosmogonic process:

In the process of destruction, the finite being seeks
to become the universe itself [because] man is a
complex of all that surrounds him. 60

58. Elements 53.

59. Ibid, 40.

60. Ibid, 91, 98

311

COLLAPSE IV

5. ... Post-Okenian Problems.

The continuance of Being is a continuous positing of the
Eternal, or of nothing, a ceaseless process of becoming real in
that which is not. There exists nothing but nothing, nothing
but the Eternal, and all individual existence is only a fallacious
existence. All individual things are monads, nothings, which
have, however, become determined. 61

We have noted that the Okenian number series are
primary, and issue from a primary Zero, 'the one essence
of all things, the 0, the highest identity'. 62 Disregarding for
the moment the metaphysics of polar time, the Zero is, if
not primitive, then ultimate, insofar as everything resolves
into it. Oken invests considerable effort in the elaboration
of zero.

Firstly, it is twofold: intensive or ideal, and extensive
or real. Yet these two remain indifferent: 'the real and the
ideal are no more different than ice and water; both [. . .] are
essentially one and the same'. 63 This is where the repeatedly
claimed similarity of Oken's Zero and Schelling's refor-
mulated law of Identity are apparent: 64 that identity is the

61. Ibid, 58.

62. Ibid, 40.

63. Ibid, 36.

64. This tendency starts with Oken's translator, Tulk: 'the present work stands alone
in Germany, as being the most practical application upon a systematic scale of the
principles advanced by Schelling, more especially in the Mathesis and Ontology'
{Elements vi) . More recently, Joseph L. Esposito, in Schelling's Idealism ernd tlie Philosophy
of Nature (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1977, 143) repeats the point:
'Essentially Oken's system is the same as Schelling's, but with specific scientific
disciplines superimposed on it, so that it became at once a picture of the World
System and a proposal for how to study it. [. . .] Mathesis is the condition of Schelling's
Absolute Identity, wherein the first differentiation occurs'. See also Wolfgang Forster,
'Schelling als Theoretiker der Dialektik der Natur', in Hans Jorg Sandkuhler, ed,

312

COLLAPSE IV

ground of differentiation, and that no differentia, insofar as
they are different, are identical.

Secondly, the susceptibility of Zero to 'infinitely
numerous forms' 65 invites speculation as to the other forms
it has in fact assumed: apart from Eschenmayer's magnetic
schema, therefore, Kant's account of the eliminative
actions of negative magnitudes, or the ontological problem
of negative numbers, pinion around zeros, as does the
'minimax' of zero sum games, or the empty set from which
Russell and Whitehead, on the one hand, and Badiou
on the other, draw such diverse ontological conclusions.
Finally, and perhaps decisively, the ungenerated and
ungenerable, non-phenomenal attributes of the Platonic
Idea make it into the zero of the physical world, a series
of problems best explored in the Parmenides. The actual
and potential permutability of zero into many formal
schemas brings Oken's theorizing out of the domain of
the 'number mysticism' of which he has been routinely
accused 66 to demonstrate the ontological vitality of the
problem of the relation of number, being and animal. 67 The
question Badiou raises against Deleuze of the separability
of mathematics and ontology, on the one hand, from nature
on the other, is, as is topologically appropriate, twisted in
Oken. On the one hand, Mathesis, ontology and biology form

Natur mid gesehiehtlie/ier Prozess. Studien zur Naturphilosophie F.W.J. Sehellings. (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 188, and Ghisclin, he. cit. , 439.

65. Ele?7ie?its 40 .

66. Ghisclin, beat, 440.

67. See Alain Badiou, 'Deleuze, Tlie Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque', in Constantine
Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, eds., Deleuze and tlie "theater of Philosophy (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 51-69 and my discussion of it in relation to these problems, in
Philosophies of Nature after Sehelliug, 8ff.

314

Grant - Being and Slime / Todosch - Drawings

distinct domains that are all, on the other, articulated by their
respective and interrelated zeros. In other words, each
series takes its starting point from its predecessor, so that
Mathesis entails ontology entails biology. The problem of
the independent dependence of series one on the other is in
effect the problem solved by the generation of nature itself,
insofar as it recapitulates these series in all its products. On
Oken's evidence, then, number is inseparable from animal
precisely because animals are the numbers of nature: 6 * 'life', he
writes, 'is a mathematical problem'. 69 Mathesis, ontology
and biology are equally inseparable, therefore, because the
series are not statically taxonomic, but actually genetic. It is
the genetic element in Oken that indicates a resolution to the contem-
porary problem.

Thirdly, the Ideal and Real forms correspond to the
Zero in a state of intensity and extensity in number series.
'The latter', writes Oken, 'is only expanded intensity, the
former, extensity concentrated in the point'. 70 It is this
latter differentiation that provides Oken with the means to
formulate the issuing forth of something out of the nothing
by way of the latter's repetition rather than its expulsion of
a latent content.

The Zero thus provides a genuine solution to the
problem of sufficient reason: nothingis the reason why there
are beings, or is the ungrounding of primary ground from
which grounds emerge. This thesis is rich in implications:
firstly, since the determination of nothing occurs only in

68. I owe this point to lengthy and unforgettable conversations with my colleague
Sean Watson.

69. Elements, 104.

70. Ibid., 37

315

COLLAPSE IV

the process of extension and concentration, and since it is
susceptible to 'infinitely numerous forms', it grounds the
contingency of all beings, although it ought not to be omitted
that it grounds this contingency of singulars. Secondly, if all
things have one essence (= 0; Elements 40), then in what
sense are all things really diverse? If merely formally (as Oken
in fact argues), then ontology - the actual generation of
singulars - cannot fulfill its function, and the All remains =
0; if essentially, then the Zero ceases to be the primitive = the
highest in all things, and the All is not = 0. The problem this
poses can thus be summatively stated: is the Zero capable
of real generation? Since Oken answers that 'naturephilos-
ophy is the generative history' or 'the science of the genesis
of the world', 71 the formal and essential 'generations' of zero
must be essentially indifferent while formally different. If,
however, all difference is formal difference, and the Zero is
always the generating (potentiable and negable) element,
then it must either be concluded that formal difference is
essentially indifferent or that formal differentiation is the
generation of an additional mode not given in the alternatives.
This, indeed, is Oken's solution: 'positing and negating the
Eternal is called realisation'. 72

What does the contingency of all beings therefore
entail? That the formal differentiation and essential indif-
ference of the generations of zeros never attain to fixity,
whether of species, phyla or morphology. Indeed, this is
guaranteed by the endlessly rotating axes of theogonic
and hylogenic nature, 73 just as it is by Oken's 'singular to

71. Ibid, 11,66.

72. Ibid, 40.

73. cf. Elements 142, 161.

316

Grant - Being and Slime / Todosch - Drawings

whole' transformation of the genetic problem. Accordingly,
Oken's is a universal morphogenesis, which earned his
work credit from D'Arcy Thompson 74 and E.S. Russell, 75
amongst others. Okenian ontology does not therefore so
much chart whole entities, but rather singulars, both in the
sense of cosmogony, or the generation of the one universe -
'there can be only one nature'; 76 and of stoichogeny, or the
generation of the elements and organs that accrete to the
various formally differentiated singulars. Ceaselessly oscillating
around the zeros from which they issue and the complexes
they recapitulate, depending on the extensity of the zeros'
generations, the emergent material forms are not so much
limited geometries as they are limited acts.

Taking these points together, it becomes evident that
what the contingency conferred upon beings by Oken's
principle of sufficient reason consists in is the consequence
of the contingency of dynamics. On this account, biology is
the science of the contingent dynamics of the primal slime,
oscillating between the achievement of Ideation and mineral
inertia. Indeed, the polar field thus generated by biology
involves rocks as much as Ideas, as much as the biological
singular involves the osseous and the nervous systems;
all biological systems, however, are evolved from the slimy,

74. D'Arcy Thompson cites Oken twice by name in Chi Growth ami Form [1917]. Ed &
abridged byJ.T. Bonner. {Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), and gives
the following, Okenian account of morphology: 'Morphology is not only a study
of material things and of the forms of material things, but has its dynamical aspect,
under which we deal with the interpretation, in terms of force, of the operations of
Energy' 14.

75. E.S.Russell, in Form and Function: a Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology
(London: John Murray, 1916), 90, thus describes Oken as'a careful student of
embryology'. The most recent exponent of the positive view of Okenian morphology
is Stephen J. Gould, op. n't.

76. Fhinents, 166.

317

COLLAPSE IV

protoplasmic mass whose contingencies are involved in them.
To return to the problem of the separability of mathematics
and nature, we must now pose it the other way round: is a
slime-free mathenie possible? Morphology with its principle of
sufficient reason, argues not.

6. Conclusion: The Rotations of the Before
and the After

With Schelling, we argued at the beginning of this
essay that the ethical process is possible only if the 'shock of
the objective world' can be abstracted away. One means
of achieving this is by insisting on the separability of
mathematics and nature, and by insisting on the 'impossi-
bility' of a philosophy of nature, as does Badiou. 77 Another
means of achieving this is by insisting on the insuperability
of the nominal frameworks of self-conscious, finite reason.
Since the latter is a subdivision of the former, however,
there is no difference in kind, but only in degree, between
these two means of abstracting the world.

Oken's insistence, by contrast, on the material world of
nature as forming the generative basis not only of natural
individuation, but also of the thought-series that can only
arise on their basis in turn, suggests that one more entailment
might flow from his principle of sufficient reason: the order
of priority of nature and mind. With this order, the shock
of conjoint time and change by which Lambert forced the
progressive splintering of the system of transcendental
philosophy, is reintroduced: if there is an order of priority,
how can it be grounded given the ceaseless rotation of Matter
and God? To resolve this merely formally, by arguing that

77. Badiou, beat., 64.

318

Grant - Being and Slime / Todosch - Drawings

Matter is the zero of God, just as God is the zero of Matter,
is not to resolve the problem at all, but to avoid it, since
Mathesis consists precisely in the formal differentiation of
Matter and God - of hylogeny and theogony - from which
ontogenesis flows. Further, we have already noted Oken's
inversion of his initially stated order of priority: 'nature
first, mind second' 78 becomes 'mind first, nature second'. 79
Since we must concede that Oken's dynamics admit of no
transcendent or transcendental axes, therefore, the grounds
of the before and the after must be established by other
means.

Ultimately, as Oken repeatedly argues, the task of
naturephilosophy is 'to show how [...] the Material took its
origin; and therefore, how something derived its existence
from nothing'. 80 By now we recognise this as Oken's
trademark, polar procedure: matter and nothing are
conjointly the first focus of the systematic task of generating
nature in thought. Thought, in other words, involves matter
and nothing, i.e., the whole (Mathesis). Indeed, philosophy
and war are the latest of the zero's accretions, the former
consisting always in 'the repetition of the origin of the
world', 81 while the latter, through the 'process of destruction',
seeks to reestablish the essential identity of everything 82 in
the zero that must necessarily remain. Each involves the
entire universe and its generation; the first as universal
repetition, the second as universal equation. War reveals
the ground, and philosophy repeats its generations, up to

78. Elements, 15-16.

79. Ibid, 18.

80. Ibid, 10.

81. Ibid, 2.

82. Ibid, 91.

319

Grant - Being and Slime / Todosch - Drawings

and including its own generation in nature. Because ground
supersedes its repetition, which precedes its revelation,
an order of priority can be established in thought. Hence
Oken: 'Time is the act of numbering; numbering is
thinking; thinking is time'. 83

This is not to argue that time exists only in thought, in the
Kantian manner, but rather that, as Oken notes, thinking is
time. This is because

Time itself is only repetition [. . .] The vicissitude of things is in
fact time; if there be no change, there is also no time. 84

In other words, because the grounding of existents
consists in the repetition of zero, this grounding extends to
Ideation, to philosophy. Philosophy is the formal repetition
of cosmogony, while war is its essential repetition. Because
Ideation is not itself the ground of time (Kant), but time
that of Ideation, the grounding of existents in nothing
establishes the a priority of nature with respect to mind,
but without segregating mind from any part of nature or
Mathesis. The principle of sufficient reason therefore states:
something emerges from nothing, and this process is inviolable.

Oken's natural history of metaphysics therefore indicates
that naturephilosophy is not simply a means, but the necessary
means by which post-Kantian philosophy escapes the trap
that the ethical process sets for it: the primacy of nature
extends even to those slimy neural accretions to the primal
Zero that make metaphysics possible.

83. Elements, 75.

84. Ibid, 74.

321

VOC LESS ALTARS OF FLESH
NAILED IK UNHOLY MISERY
CENTURIES IN DECOMPOSITION
SPAWN OF AZAGTHQTH
SCATUPHAGOUSGOATFATHER
EPOCH OF DISFIGURED UNLIGHT
FLUORESCENT BLEEDING CHAOS
PNEUMATIC SLAUGHTER
EXHAUSTED ORGANIC STENCH
FECULENT CRUCIFEAST
SOOOMYTHICAL FROST GOATS
HERPET'FDP*- FILTHGHIHDER

wares

SPIRITUAL AMPUTATION
VOMITOIUHCONVULSNS
?£S DD ™ET
TRIUMPHANT SECRETIONS
ENDLESS BLEEDING JOUNEY
DIRTY INFAMOUS PAGAN FOG
SUCK MY UNHOLY VOMIT
MALIGNANT INCEPTION

CHTHO i*rf IGIC HUNGER , I DESTROY SACREn WORDS

■BlESELW L T

COLLAPSE IV

Poems XVII

Steven Shearer

Charcoal on rag paper, each 48 x 35 inches, 2007.
(Facing Page: InstallationView of Poems, Berlin 2006/

323

AROUSED BY ABRUPT S1ENCH OF

MOLECULAR DISEMBOWELMENT
NOCTILUCENT LUBRICANT RAIN
SPASMODIC CONSECRATION
TOWERS OF LIMBS AND FEVERS
SPIRITUAL FECULENCE
DRUNKEN SODOMYTHIC DEICIDE
SEPTIC CHRIST RESURRECTION
ENSHRINED INTO ABUSE
FEEDING OFF UNHOLY GROWTH
SOLAR EXECUTION ECLIPSE
MASTURBATE UPON THRONE OF
PNEUMATIC DESECRATION
WRECKAGE IN COLD FLESH

MAJESTIC ELDERLY WASTE
SKULLFUCKING DEMENTIA
ENDLESS BLEEDING JOURNEY
FOUNTAINS OF GOAT SEMEN
COPROPHAGIC COMMUNION
BEATEN MOCKED CRUCIFIED
WELL OF ALL HUMAN TEARS
APOCALYPSE INSIDE
DARK GLEAM OF OBSCURITY
TRIUMPHANT SICKNESS
FROZEN HOLOCAUST CLOUDS
MARCHING TO MY SEPULTURE
JEHOVAH DESECRATION
EXQUISITE SEXUAL VOMIT

ELECTRONIC APPARITION
UNHOLY DEATH AFTER DEATH
SCULPTING THE UNCLEAN
GOATVOMIT TRANSFUSION
PARASITES IN GARDEN OF CHRIST
FLOWERING DECIMATIONS
DEFILED IN PUTRID SILENCE
ABORTUM ABRUPTION
FUCKING UNHOLY OBSCURITY
MISCREATION OF FUSED FLESH
PERISHING BLACK LIGHT
SUICIDAL INSTINCTS
MIRRORS OF SUFFOCATION
RESURRECTION IN RECTUM

HIGH ON FORMALDEHYDE
EXHAUSTED CENTURY
BLOOD OF CHAOS CONSUMED
DRAPED IN PUTRID FLESH
SYMPHONIC GOATSODOMY
INFECTED CADAVER FLOWS
CRUCIFIED HUMILIATION
EXTREME TRUTH OF CARNAGE
ABHORRED DESPISER
SODOMASTICATE THE LIFELESS
ENDLESS HALLS OF SUFFERING
PRAYING AND DECOMPOSING
SCRIPTURAL PERVERSIONS
CLOSE YOUR FUCKING BOOK

RAPED OF YOUR RELIGION
SUPREME ANCIENT SANCTUM
NECROCADAVERIC RUMPUS
MORBID NUN IMPREGNATOR
CEASELESS RAMPAGE
ODIOUS HARLEQUIN FETUS
TAKE OATH OF BLACK BLOOD
CRUCIFIXION SKULL CHALICE
FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROT
MACABRE EXECUTIONS
MOLEST THE CIRCLE OF LIFE
DROWNING IN AFTERBIRTH
CHRISTIAN COMPOST
AS SEMEN BLENDS WITH ASH

DISEMBOWELMENT OF THRONE
APOCALYPTIC THORACOPAGUS
MARCHING TO WINTER BATTLE
SACRIFICED UNDER PENTAGRAM
HEDONISTIC CARVING
SPECTRUM OF AGGRESSION
PLACENTOPHAGIC GORGING
FOUL SLUMBER OF BAPHOMETH
COVERED WITH DARKNESS
SPIRITUAL MOLESTATION
CANNIBALISM FROM WOMB
HALO OF BURNING WINGS
REBIRTH IN ROTTED GALLOWS
GOATFUCKING REHEARSAL

JESUS AUTOPSY EUPHORIA
CHAINS OF CHRISTIAN FILTH
BLEED UPON THE CROSS
BEHEADED AND SANCTIFIED
CEREMONIAL DARKNESS
STRIPPED OF MY FOUL FLESH
EXHUMED NECROMESSIAH
SOLSTICE OF OPPRESSION
FRENETIC GOAT WORSHIP
CLOTTED LIGHT OF ODIUM
CEREMONIAL EMBRYOMUTATION
GRACELESS CRUEL NOISE
PROFANATICA ABRUPTUS
BAPTIZED IN VOMIT OF PRIEST

331

COLLAPSE IV

Singular Agitations
and a Common Vertigo

Keith Tilford

p335. Graft, ink on paper, 114.3cm x 76.2cm, 2004

p343. Chatterbox, ink on paper, 106.7cm x 76.2cm, 2004

p347. Untitled, ink, marker and eraser on colour plate,

22.5cm x 18.7cm, 2008

p352. Untitled, ink, marker and eraser on colour plate,

26cm x 20.3cm, 2008

p358. Negative Machinery, ink on paper,
121.9cm x 121.9cm, 2005

p361. Untitled, ink, marker and eraser on colour plate,

28.6cm x 20.3cm, 2008

p364. Untitled, ink on bristol board,
58.4cm x 73.7cm, 2004

332

COLLAPSE IV

On the Horror of Phenomenology:
Lovecraft and Husserl

Graham Harman

In a dismissive review of a recent anthology on
Schelling, Andrew Bowie accuses two authors of a style
he 'increasingly' thinks of as 'continental science fiction'. 1
There is room for further increase in Bowie's thinking. With
his implication that science fiction belongs to the juvenile or
the unhinged, Bowie enforces a sad limitation on mental
experiment. For nothing resembles science fiction more
than philosophy does — unless it be science itself. From
its dawning in ancient Greece, philosophy has been the
asylum of strange notions: a cosmic justice fusing opposites
into a restored whole; a series of emanations from fixed
stars to the moon to the prophets; divine intervention in the

1. Andrew Bowie, 'Something old, something new ...', in Radical Philosophy 128
(November/December 2004), 46. The review is of Tlie Mew Sc/wlliiig,]. Norman & A.
Welchman {eds.} (London: Continuum, 2004). The targets of Bowie's censure are
Iain Hamilton Grant and Alberto Toscano.

333

COLLAPSE IV

movement of human hands and legs; trees and diamonds
with infinite parallel attributes, only two of them known;
insular monads sparkling like mirrors and attached to tiny
bodies built from chains of other monads; and the eternal
recurrence of every least event. While the dismal consensus
that such speculation belongs to the past is bolstered by the
poor imagination of some philosophers, it finds no support
among working scientists, who grow increasingly wild in
their visions. Even a cursory glance at the physics literature
reveals a discipline bewitched by strange attractors,
degenerate topologies, black holes filled with alternate
worlds, holograms generating an illusory third dimension,
and matter composed of vibrant ten-dimensional strings.
Mathematics, unconstrained by empirical data, has long
been still bolder in its gambles. Nor can it be said that science
fiction is a marginal feature of literature itself. Long before
the mighty crabs and squids of Lovecraft and the tribunals
of Kafka, we had Shakespeare's witches and ghosts, Mt.
Purgatory in the Pacific, the Cyclops in the Mediterranean,
and the Sphinx tormenting the north of Greece.

Against the model of philosophy as a rubber stamp for
common sense and archival sobriety, I would propose that
philosophy's sole mission is weird realism. Philosophy must
be realist because its mandate is to unlock the structure of
the world itself; it must be weird because reality is weird.
'Continental science fiction', and 'continental horror', must
be transformed from insults into a research program. It
seems fruitful to launch this program with ajoint treatment
of Edmund Husserl and H.P Lovecraft, an unlikely pair
that I will try to render more likely. The dominant strand
of twentieth-century continental thought stems from the

'\

-.

'■'^S«tli'f r 'i n

m

334

COLLAPSE IV

phenomenology of Husserl, whose dry and affable works
conceal a philosophy tinged with the bizarre. In almost the
same period, the leading craftsman of horror and science
fiction in literature was Lovecraft, recently elevated from
pulp author to canonical classic by the prestigious Library
of America series. 2 The road to continental science fiction
leads through a Lovecraftian reading of phenomenology.
This remark is not meant as a prank. Just as Lovecraft
turns prosaic New England towns into the battleground
of extradimensional fiends, Husserl's phenomenology
converts simple chairs and mailboxes into elusive units that
emit partial, contorted surfaces. In both authors, the broken
link between objects and their manifest crust hints at 'such
terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position
therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation
or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of
a new dark age' 3 - or preferably, revive a metaphysical
speculation that embraces the permanent strangeness of
objects. If philosophy is weird realism, then a philosophy
should be judged by what it can tell us about Lovecraft.
In symbolic terms, Great Cthulhu should replace Minerva
as the patron spirit of philosophers, and the Miskatonic
must dwarf the Rhine and the Ister as our river of choice.
Since Heidegger's treatment of Holderlin resulted mostly
in pious, dreary readings, philosophy needs a new literary
hero.

2. H.P. Lovecraft, Tales (New York: The Library of America, 2005}.

3. Ibid., 167. From the famous first paragraph of 'The Call of Cthulhu.'

336

Harman - Horror of Phenomenology / Tilford - Agitations

Lovecraft's Materialism

In the great tales of Lovecraft we find a mythology
centered in New England, but ranging from the Antarctic
to Pluto as well. Humans are no longer lords of the cosmos,
but are surrounded by hidden monstrosities who evade or
corrupt our race, sometimes plotting its downfall. 'The Old
Ones', or 'Those Ones', are the disturbing general terms by
which these creatures are known. They vastly exceed us in
mental and physical prowess, yet occasionally interbreed
with human females, preferring women of a decayed
genetic type. The least encounter with the Old Ones often
results in mental breakdown, and all reports of dealings
with them are hushed. But their unspeakable powers are
far from infinite. To achieve their aims, the Old Ones seek
minerals in the hills of Vermont, infiltrate churches in
seaport towns, and pursue occult manuscripts under the
eyes of suspicious librarians. Their researches are linked
not only with Lovecraft's fictional authors and archives (the
mad Arab al-Hazred, Miskatonic University), but real ones
as well (Pico della Mirandola, Harvard's Widener Library).
Their corpses are carried away by floods, and even the
mighty Cthulhu explodes, though briefly, when rammed
by a human-built ship. There are also rivalries between
the monsters, as becomes clear in At the Mountains of
Madness'. The powers of the various Old Ones are no
more uniform than they are infinite.

This balance in the monsters between power and frailty
is mentioned to oppose any Kantian reading of Lovecraft.
Such a reading is understandable, since Kant's inaccessible
noumenal world seems a perfect match for the cryptic
stealth of Lovecraft's creatures. His descriptions of their

337

COLLAPSE IV

bodies and actions are almost deliberately insufficient, and
seem to allude to dimensions beyond the finite conditions
of human perception. His monsters are not just mysterious,
but often literally invisible; they undermine our stock of
emotional responses and zoological categories. The very
architecture of their cities mocks the principles of Euclidean
geometry. A few examples will indicate the style:

When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the
wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury Pike [. . .] he comes
upon a lonely and curious country [...] Gorges and ravines of
problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden
bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips
again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively
dislikes [...]*

Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect of
incisions, seemed to inflict the visible cattle [...] 5
[Wilbur Whateley] would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar
jargon, and chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener
with a sense of unexplainable terror. 6
And most compellingly:

It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human
pen could describe [the dead creature on the floor], but one
may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by
anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely
bound up with the life-forms of this planet and of the three
known dimensions. 7

4. Ibid., 370-1. Italics added.

5. Ibid., 375-6. Italics added.

6. Ibid., 379. Italics added.

7. Ibid., 389. Italics added.

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At the climax of 'The Dunwich Horror', when Curtis
Whateley briefly glimpses the formerly hidden creature
on the mountaintop, he describes it as made of squirming
ropes, shaped somewhat like a hen's egg, with dozens of
legs like barrels that shut halfway as it walks — a jelly-like
creature having nothing solid about it, with great bulging
eyes and ten or twenty mouths, somewhat grey in color
with blue or purple rings, and a 'half-face' on top. 8 In the
later tale At the Mountains of Madness', the vast Antarctic
city displays 'no architecture known to man [...] with vast
aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous
perversions of known geometrical laws.' 9 When this dead
metropolis is first sighted from the air, the narrator assumes
it must be a polar mirage:

There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted,
surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously
enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped discs;
and strange, beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles
of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-
pointed stars [...] There were composite cones and pyramids
either alone or surmounting cylinders and cubes or flatter
truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like
spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures
seemed knit together by tubular bridges [. . .]. 10

The near-incoherence of such descriptions undercuts
any attempt to render them in visual form. The very point
of the descriptions is that they fail, hinting only obliquely at
some unspeakable substratum of reality. It is obvious why
this might seem Kantian in its implications.

8. Ibid, 409-10.

9. Ibid, 508.

10. Ibid, 508-9.

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COLLAPSE IV

Nonetheless, the Kantian reading fails. Even if we
accepted a metaphysics splitting the world into noumenal
and phenomenal realms, there is no question that the
Old Ones would belong entirely to the phenomenal. The
mere fact of invisibility is surely not enough to qualify
the monsters as noumenal. The so-called Higgs boson of
present-day physics, assuming it exists, lies beyond the gaze
of current particle accelerators. No one has ever witnessed
the core of the earth, or the center of the Milky Way which
may or may not be home to a massive black hole. Countless
other forces must exist in the universe that could be only
decades away from discovery, while others will remain
shielded from human insight in perpetuity. But this does not
make them noumenal: these forces, however bizarre, would
still belong to the causal and spatio-temporal conditions
that, for Kant, belong solely to the structure of human
experience. Let us grant further that the Old Ones may
have features permanently outstripping human intelligence,
in a way that the Higgs boson may not. Even so, this would
be the result not of the transcendental structure of human
finitude, but only of our relative stupidity. The game of
chess is not 'noumenal' for dogs through their inability to
grasp it, and neither is Sanskrit grammar for a deranged
adult or a three-year-old. In 'The Whisperer in Darkness',
the Old Ones even invite humans to become initiated into
their larger view of the world :

Do you realise what it means when I say that I have been on
thirty-seven different celestial bodies — planets, dark stars, and
less definable objects — including eight outside our galaxy and
two outside the curved cosmos of space and time? [...] The
visitors are eager to know men of knowledge like yourself, and

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to shew them the great abysses that most of us have had to
dream about in fanciful ignorance. 11

Humans prepare to reach these deeper abysses, neither
through Heideggerian Angst nor a mystical experience that
leaps beyond finitude and reduces philosophy to straw, but
through purely medical means: 'My brain has been removed
from my body by fissions so adroit that it would be crude to
call them surgery.' 12 The great horror of Lovecraft's universe
lies not in some sublime infinite that no finite intelligence
can fully grasp, but in the invasion of the finite world by
finite malignant beings. For all the limits imposed on our
intellect by Kant, he leaves us reassured that the finite and
phenomenal world is insulated from horror, governed
and structured by our own familiar categories. Far more
troubling is Lovecraft's subversion of the finite world: no
longer a kingdom led by innocuous rational beings, but one
in which humans face entities as voracious as insects, who
use black magic and telepathy while employing mulatto
sailors as worse-than-terrorist operatives.

The Old Ones are anything but noumenal. Noumenal
beings scarcely have need of buildings, whether Euclidean
or otherwise. Noumenal beings are not dissected on the
tables of polar explorers, do not mine for rocks in Vermont,
and have no purpose mastering Arabic and Syriac dialects
to consult the writings of medieval wizards. They would
never speak in physical voices, not even with 'the drone
of some loathsome, gigantic insect ponderously shaped
into the articulate speech of an alien species [...] [with]
singularities of timbre, range, and overtones [placing it]

11. Ibid., 468.

12. Ibid.

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COLLAPSE IV

wholly outside the sphere of humanity and earth-life.' 13
Michel Houellebecq, in a brilliant study of Lovecraft, 14
is correct to emphasize his absolute materialism: 'What
is Great Cthulhu? An arrangement of electrons, like us.
Lovecraft's terror is rigorously material. But, it is quite
possible, given the free interplay of cosmic forces, that
Great Cthulhu possesses abilities and powers to act that far
exceed ours. Which, a priori, is not particularly reassuring
at all.' 15

The terror of Lovecraft is not a noumenal horror, then,
but a horror of phenomenology. Humans cease to be
master in their own house. Science and letters no longer
guide us toward benevolent enlightenment, but may force
us to confront 'notions of the cosmos, and of [our] own
place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention
is paralysing', and 'impose monstrous and unguessable
horrors upon certain venturous [humans]'. 16 Confronted
with the half-human offspring of the Old Ones, even the
political Left will endorse the use of concentration camps:
'Complaints from many liberal organizations were met
with long confidential discussions, and representatives were
taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result,
these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent'. 17

13. Ibid, 434.

14. Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Agaimtthe World, Against Life, trans. D. Khazeni,
Introduction by Stephen King. (San Francisco: Believer Books, 2005).

15. Ibid, 32.

16. Ibid, 719. From 'The Shadow Out of Time.'

17. Ibid, 587. From 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth.'

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Agitations

To expand on a passage cited earlier:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of
the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it
was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each
straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little;
but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge
will open such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful
position within, that we shall either go mad from the revelation
or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new
dark age. 18

18. Ibid, 167.

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COLLAPSE IV

Though ostensibly Kantian on a first reading, nothing
could be less Kantian than this passage in its call for barriers
to enlightenment, and its placement of 'terrifying vistas'
not in some transcendent sublime, but in the electrons that
form the pulpy torso of Great Cthulhu.

The Weirdness of Objects

The literary critic Harold Bloom shares the following
anecdote:

Some years ago, on a stormy night in New Haven, I sat down to
reread, yet once more, John Milton's Paradise Lost [...] I wanted
to start all over again with the poem: to read it as though I had
never read it before, indeed as though no one had ever read it
before me [. . .] And while I read, until I fell asleep in the middle
of the night, the poem's initial familiarity began to dissolve
[...] Although the poem is a biblical epic, in classical form, the
peculiar impression it gave me was what I generally ascribe to
literary fantasy or science fiction, not to heroic epic. Weirdness
was its overwhelming effect. 19

Science fiction is found not only in 'science fiction',
but in great literature of any sort. More generally, Bloom
contends that 'one mark of an originality that can win
canonical status for a literary work is a strangeness that
we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes
such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncracies.' 20
Although Bloom has little time for philosophy, which
he views as cognitively less original than literature, his
standard of canonical achievement seems equally valid for

19. Harold Bloom, the Western Canon, 24-5. (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004).
Italics added.

20. Ibid., 4.

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philosophical work. If there is one feature that unites the
great works of philosophy, it is surely their inability to be
fully assimilated, or their tendency to become such a given
that we are blinded to their strangeness. Though Plato
and Kant can be seen as restrictive establishment figures,
their works are saturated with deviant images and nearly
fantastic concepts; they exceed all possible interpretation,
resist all attempted summary, and appeal to readers of
any nationality or political orientation. The education of
young philosophers builds on these works as on bedrock.
And they come alive only when some gifted interpreter
rediscovers their strangeness.

Pressing further, it also seems evident that the
strangeness of works comes less from the works as a whole
than from the weirdness of the personae that fill them,
whether in literature, philosophy, or science. Though Don
Quixote and Lear's Fool appear solely in literary works,
they are no more reducible to extant plot lines than our
friends are exhaustively grasped by our dealings with them.
Characters, in the broadest sense, are objects. Though we
only come to know them through specific literary incidents,
these events merely hint at a character's turbulent inner
life — which lies mostly outside the work it inhabits,
and remains fully equipped for sequels that the author
never produced. If a lost Shakespearean tragedy were
discovered, dealing with the apparent suicide of the Fool
(who disappears without explanation from the existing
text of King Lear), the same Fool would have to be present
in the new work, however unexpected its speeches. The
same is true of philosophical concepts, which must also be
viewed as characters or objects. While recent philosophy

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insists on precise definitions of every term, a genuine
philosophical concept always eludes such precision. We
could list the known features of Leibniz's monads in a
laminated chart, yet the list includes contradictions, and
surely leaves us hungry for more. The same holds true of
argon in chemistry or the string in physics. A thing cannot
be reduced to the definitions we give of it, because then
the thing would change with each tiny change in its known
properties, as Kripke has sharply objected. 21 A good rule of
thumb is as follows: unless a character gives rise to different
interpretations, unless a scientific entity endures changed
notions of its properties, unless a philosopher is entangled
in contradictory assertions over one and the same concept,
unless a new technology has unforeseen impact, unless a
politician's party is one day disappointed, unless a friend is
able to generate and experience surprises, then we are not
dealing with anything very real. We will be dealing instead
with useful surface qualities, not with objects. Let 'object'
refer to any reality with an autonomous life deeper than its
qualities, and deeper than its relations with other things.
In this sense, an object is reminiscent of an Aristotelian
primary substance, which supports different qualities at
different times. Socrates can laugh, sleep, or cry at various
moments while still remaining Socrates - which entails that
he can never be exhaustively described or defined.

My thesis is that objects and weirdness go hand in
hand. An object partly evades all announcement through
its qualities, resisting or subverting efforts to identify it with
any surface. It is that which exceeds any of the qualities,
accidents, or relations that can be ascribed to it: an 'I know

21. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996).

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Agitations

not what', but in a positive sense. Against frequent efforts
to dismiss objects as fantasies assembled by humans from
a pre-given surface of experienced contents, I contend that
reality is object-oriented. Reality is made up of nothing
but substances — and they are weird substances with a
taste of the uncanny about them, rather than stiff blocks
of simplistic physical matter. Contact with reality begins
when we cease to reduce a thing to its properties or to its
effect on other things. The difference between objects and
their peripheral features (qualities, accidents, relations) is

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COLLAPSE IV

absolute. Though this thesis is deeply classical, it cannot
possibly be 'reactionary', since the objects of which I speak
resist all reduction to dogma, and in fact are the only force
in the world capable of doing so.

Intentional Objects

Few will object to the term 'weird realism' as a description
of Lovecraft's outlook. Weird Tales was the periodical that
spawned his career, and 'weird fiction' the term most
often used for his own writings. Lovecraft was opposed to
realism in the literary sense of James or Zola, their minute
descriptions confined to the subtleties of human life. Yet
he seems like a realist in the philosophical sense, hinting
at dark powers and malevolent geometries subsisting well
beyond the grasp of human life. By contrast, Edmund
Husserl seems to be neither weird, nor a realist, and even
looks like the opposite: a 'non-weird antirealist'. No reader,
however emotionally unstable, is terrified by Husserl's
works. Even in his life history, the sufferings we find stem
from personal and political burdens, not from the family
strain of madness that paralyzed the young Lovecraft and
destroyed his parents. Moreover, when phenomenology
is critiqued or abandoned, this is usually because of its
wholehearted idealism. All of phenomenology results from
a decision to 'bracket' the world, suspending reflection
on real waves, genes, and chemicals in favor of what lies
entirely within human consciousness. Ironically, this point
has led some to compare Husserl with Kant as well. Here
the comparison fails yet again, but for the opposite reason:
while Lovecraft's monsters are too shallow to be noumenal,
Husserl's intentional objects are too deep to be purely
phenomenal.

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Husserl often proclaimed his motto: 'to the things
themselves'. Though the phrase is partly misleading, it
should be taken more seriously by those realists who find
little of value in his thought. The first step is to remember
that Husserl's 'things themselves' are obviously not meant
in the Kantian sense. His bracketing of nature leaves him
with an immanent world of pure experience. Description
(not explanation, as with realists) is taken to be the sole
philosophical method. Furthermore, there is no room in
Husserl for real things that might be viewed directly by
God and that lie outside the parameters of human access to
the world. All of this might seem to lead to a mere flattening
of the noumenal into a special case of the phenomenal, as
found in Fichte and his heirs. In his ontology, Husserl would
seem to belong to the tradition of German Idealism; his
own student Heidegger sometimes makes this claim, hinting
vaguely that Husserlian phenomenology is the same basic
project as Hegel's Science of Logic. Some observers might even
be seduced by the recurrence of the term 'phenomenology'
in both Husserl and Hegel.

But despite Husserl's fixation on the immanent world
of appearance, he injects a dose of obstinate reality into the
immanence. This occurs through his notion of intentional
objects. The principle of intentionality is well-known:
every mental act has some object, whether it be thinking,
indicating, wishing, judging, or hating. This principle
has not been correctly understood. It does not mean that
Husserl somehow escapes idealism: his intentional objects
remain purely immanent, and must not be confused with
real forces unleashed in the world. The trees I perceive, the
food I enjoy, or the swindlers I despise, remain phenomenal

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COLLAPSE IV

entities. After all, their real existence is bracketed, so that our
description of them takes no account of whether they truly
exist. Intentionality remains phenomenal. But Husserl's
genuine difference from the idealists lies in the fact that
intentional reality is made up of objects, which play no role
at all for Fichte or Hegel. It is said that Husserl would lead
his students through painstaking descriptions of a mailbox;
perhaps on other days it was lampposts, inkwells, cats,
rings, or vases. The point of such descriptions was 'eidetic
variation', considering these objects from a variety of angles
so as to approach their unvarying essence beneath all passing
manifestation. The mere fact that intentional objects
have an essence should prevent our seeing Husserl as a
straightforward idealist, since 'essence' is normally a realist
term, linked with the inherent features of a substance apart
from all access to it. It is unthinkable that Fichte or Hegel
would guide their students through minute descriptions
of a specific solid object, since in their current of thinking
objects have no stubborn essence of their own. 'Essence', for
Hegel, is sublated into the higher unity of the concept, and
Hegelians even like to accuse later continentals of a fixation
on essence. By contrast, though Husserl brackets the world
in order to focus on an immanent field of consciousness,
the ego is not entirely master in this immanent realm. Cats
and lampposts resist our first approach, demanding patient
labours if their essence is to be gradually approached. While
the shadows in Heidegger's thought lie buried beneath
perception, Husserl's mysteries riddle the field of perception
itself. Yet both thinkers allow for secrets to be harboured in
the core of the things, and this is what separates them from
idealism. Despite their regrettable focus on human reality,
Husserl and Heidegger are object-oriented philosophers.

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In one sense Husserl's obvious rival is psychologism,
which holds that logical laws have only psychological
validity. Husserl assaults this position in his massive
prologue to the Logical Investigations, concluding that logic is
objective through its ideal validity within the phenomenal
realm. But an equally important rival is British Empiricism.
Logical Investigations II is a detailed critique of the positions of
Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. For all the differences between
these three classic figures, it is safe to portray them as allied
in advance against intentional objects. What comes first for
the empiricists are isolated qualities, sometimes known as
'impressions.' By contrast, the tradition of phenomenology
begins not with qualities, but with phenomenal objects.
While the British school holds that objects are a bundle
produced through the habit of linking diverse qualities
together (Hume), or by imagining that hidden powers
underlie qualities already seen (Locke), phenomenologists
such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty insist on beginning
with the total Gestalt before any reduction to discrete
tones and hues. For phenomenology, the slamming door
and the black fountain pen precede their qualities, which
gain sense only through a relative enslavement to those
objects. Herein lies the greatness of phenomenology, which
is more empirical than the empiricists. Experience is not
of 'experienced contents', but of objects; isolated qualities
are found not in the world we experience, but only in the
annals of empiricism.

In Logical Investigations^, the rival is Husserl's own teacher
Brentano, whether fairly or not. If Brentano held that all
mental acts are grounded in some sort of presentation,
Husserl twisted the formulation slightly, countering that

351

COLLAPSE IV

•■:

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,1 •>*■'■/

.1 ...

i **

i ■:'

An

0*

all mental acts are object-giving. The difference is subtle, but
fateful. A presentation seems to put all its contents on the
same footing. To represent a globe or a tower is to witness
a specific configuration of colors, textures, shadows, and
physical co-ordinates. But if we see experience as object-
giving rather than presentational, we shift our focus toward
the essential nucleus of the perception, stripping the paint
and confetti from its outer shell through eidetic variation.
And here we find the crucial difference between Husserl's
intentional objects and the real objects of realistphilosophers.
Real objects, which play no role in the bracketed thinking

352

Harman - Horror of Phenomenology / Tilford

Agitations

of Husserl, subsist apart from their relations to anything
else; no reality could be independent if it were generated
by efforts to perceive or influence it. In this sense, it seems
obvious that real objects must partly withhold themselves
from all perception, description, registration, or cataloguing
of their traits. A substance simply is what it is, and exceeds
the endless summation of qualities that can be ascribed
to it. But strangely enough, this is not true of Husserl's
intentional objects, where an inverse relation holds. Without
belabouring a point made elsewhere, 22 whereas real objects
taunt us with endless withdrawal, intentional objects are
always already present. A real tree would be deeper than
anything that can be said or known about it, but the tree
of intentional experience is entirely present from the start
— it is always a genuine element of experience, affecting my
decisions and my moods. If the real tree is never present
enough, the intentional tree is always excessively present,
its essence accompanied by the noisy peripheral detail
that eidetic variation needs to strip away. The real object
'fire' is able to scald, burn, boil, melt, and crack other
real objects, while the intentional object 'fire' has a very
different function: it merely unifies a shifting set of profiles
and surfaces whose various flickerings never affect its ideal
unity. Real objects hide; intentional objects are merely
weighed down with trains of sycophantic qualities, covering
them like cosmetics and jewels.

22. See 'On Vicarious Causation' in Collapse II, and Guerrilla Metaphysics:
Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things {Chicago: Open Court, 2005).

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COLLAPSE IV

The Weirdness of Husserl

The strangest defect of the books that Husserl published
during his lifetime lies in how few descriptions they actually
contain. Whatever he may have done in the classroom,
one scours his principal works in vain for more than a
handful of concrete examples. Husserl seemed content,
in his major published writings, with hesitant manifestoes
for phenomenology; Merleau-Ponty and Lingis, heirs of
greater stylistic gifts, were left to put the method to the test.
Consider the case of some massive artifact - say, a hotel
complex such as the Nile Hilton, in my adopted home city.
The phenomenologist might see it as follows: The hotel is
not an arbitrary conglomerate pieced together from flecks
of color and sound. What we first encounter is the hotel as a
whole, its visible profiles all joined in allegiance to the total
reality of the object. Observers may disagree over the exact
boundaries of the facility, over where its style begins and
ceases to reign, but all will agree that the hotel is present in
consciousness as a unit. The various doors, plants, gates,
windows, and guards are clearly imbued with a kind of
hotel-being, since all would strike us quite differently if
stripped from this zone and encountered elsewhere. We
now circle the hotel, soaking up the feel of its various
entryways: grand entrance in front, dusty two-guard access
in back, glamorous terraces when viewed from the south
at a distance, and grim windowless facade to the north.
We explore the interior, passing from food court to travel
agencies to weight room to rooftop lounge, finally knocking
on random doors and asking to examine individual rooms.
Never in these movements do we see the whole of the
Hilton, yet never do we lose the sense of a general style to

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which the individual scenes belong. It is not important that
moths and beetles would not also see it as a 'hotel', since we
are dealing here not with objective reality, but only with our
human intention of the hotel as a unified whole. Normally, we
make no separation between an intentional object and the
surface features through which it is announced. Though we
only see one face of the hotel at a time, the presence of hotel
and surface seem to be simultaneous, and joined together
without fissure.

Yet this intimate bond between object and quality
is an illusion, as both Husserl and Lovecraft are aware.
Let's begin with a Lovecraftian version of the hotel. This
requires an attempt to mimic his own literary style — a
method of reverent parody that deserves to become a staple
of philosophy. The following paragraphs might be found in
an unwritten Lovecraft tale, 'The Nile Hilton Incident' :

Though apparently of recent date, the Nile Hilton is built
around strange inner corridors of disturbingly ancient
provenance. Its membership in the Hilton chain, meant to
reassure travelers from the Occident, conceals grotesque legal
maneuvers and deviant managerial practices of a purely local
origin, and provides cover for a dubious history long expunged
from brochures. The doormen are slumped and sullen in a
manner atypical of Egypt, while their complexions speak
vaguely of a strange admixture of Aztec and Polynesian blood
not consonant with the known history of the city.

Unnoticed by the casual witness, the building itself embodies
subtle though monstrous distortions of sound engineering
principle. Though the outer walls seem to meet at solid right
angles, the hue of the concrete departs from accustomed values
in a manner suggestive of frailty or buckling. The gaping air-
shafts are striking for an edifice of such late construction, and

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COLLAPSE IV

seem fitted to an age when consumption and leprosy were still
in abundance. For unknown reasons, several of the fire escapes
would appear to issue beneath the surface of the ground. And
though the rear facade displays no evident structural flaws,
there is a sense of looming collapse in the area; one arising less
from visual clues than from certain peculiarities of sound and
odour which the management has refused to acknowledge. It
is here that a faint but incessant thumping or scraping noise
is combined with a scent joining the aroma of sandalwood to
one oddly reminiscent of the corpses of bovines. In response to
occasional complaints, the concierge makes ostentatious show
of despatching inspectors; yet something in the rhythm of his
response gives the unwonted impression of deceit.

Presumably, Merleau-Ponty was never a reader of
Lovecraft. This is unfortunate, since their methods of
description have a great deal in common. Although
we normally encounter things clothed in a variety of
costumes, we pass silently and directly through these
garments to the thing as a whole, which seems to imbue
them with its spirit. But in Lovecraft, the relation between
a thing and its surface is perturbed by irregularities that
resist immediate comprehension, as if the object suffered
from a strange disease of the nervous system. In real life,
an Egyptian doorman is usually found in a cheerful and
careless pose, displaying the typical physiognomy of the
southern populations of Aswan and Luxor. To describe
him instead as 'slumped and sullen', as displaying racial
features of distant or extinguished peoples, and especially
to call attention to one's perplexity over these aberrations,
leads to a breakdown in the usual immediate bond between
the doorman and his qualities. A rare fissure is generated
between the object and its traits. Although 'Egyptian

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Harman - Horror of Phenomenology / Tilford - Agitations

doorman' remains a legitimate element of our experience,
he is now a menacing kernel that seems to control his
outer features like ghastly marionettes, rather than being
immediately fused with them. Merleau-Ponty would agree
that the durability of concrete is somehow legible in its
colour, though the total emotional and perceptual effect
of a wall is normally simultaneous and unified. But to
suggest that something is amiss in the expected colour of
a wall, something that faintly suggests imminent physical
breakdown, is to decompose the usual bond between the
phenomenon and the outer forms through which it is
announced. Language is also able to hint at depth, at real
things lying outside all access to them. Surprisingly, this
is not the method of Lovecraft, whose materialism gives
him a philosophy rooted in the surface, but one in which
the relation between objects and their crusts is rendered
problematic. His monsters are not deep in themselves, and
function in his stories only to disturb the assumptions of
human observers. One can imagine third-person tales of
the Old Ones battling in outer space, aeons before the
emergence of human beings. Such stories would yield
more of fantasy than of horror, since we would miss the
gradual awareness of human subordination that provides
the Cthulhu mythos with its terror. There is nothing
inherently compelling about a humanoid dragon with an
octopus for a head; any teenager could draw such a thing,
while scaring no-one. The horror comes instead from the
declared insufficiency of the description, combined with a
literary world in which this monster is a genuine player
rather than a mere image. The description is horrific only
insofar as it undermines any distinct image: 'If I say that my
somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous

357

COLLAPSE IV

pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature,
I shall not be entirely unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.
A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly
body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline
of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.' 23
Whatever this 'general outline' may be, the narrator feels
that his descriptions are at best 'not entirely unfaithful' to
its spirit. But this is the very principle of phenomenological
description, whose eidetic reductions never quite grasp the
essence of the thing, and which differs from Lovecraft only
in its usual avoidance of the theme of existential threat.
In both cases, the known link between objects and their
properties partially dissolves.

-. " ' ■

.■■■■■:■• ficQ-il ; 'M \$

Sir*' ;

i

23. Lovecraft, Tales, 169. From 'The Call of Cthulhu.'

358

Harman - Horror of Phenomenology / Tilford - Agitations

While there are palpable similarities between Lovecraft
and Poe in their preference for moods of horror, too little
has been said about their similarities of style. In both
authors we find hesitant and flowery wording that not only
paints their narrators as frail aesthetes, but effectively stunts
the relation between things and their traits. In Poe's tale
'The Fall of the House of Usher', the narrator describes
Roderick as having 'a nose of a Hebrew model, but with
a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely
moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a
want of moral energy.' 24 To claim directly that there is a
typical Jewish nose with a specific nostril size, or that the
character of a person can be read from structures of the
skull, would merely make one a racist and a phrenologist.
But Poe's strange appeal to unexpected disproportions
of nostril and chin manages to disassemble the complex
amalgam of surface and inference that silently accompanies
every new face. To say that Roderick can bear no sounds
except the music of guitars would merely give an eccentric
description, not a horrific one. The terror comes instead
through Poe's meandering way of depicting the trait:
'there were but peculiar sounds, and those from stringed
instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.' 25
Roderick's panpsychist theory of inanimate perception
might be just a vitalist platitude if stated in a journal article.
Yet Poe surrounds the idea with enlivening obstacles: 'His
opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all
vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had
assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under

24. Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales, 321. (New York: Library of America, 1984.)

25. Poe, Poetry and Tales, 322.

359

COLLAPSE IV

certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization.' 26
The phrasing should not be dismissed as belonging to
a lost era of florid English style; the circumlocution is
deliberate, and creates a gap between object and profile that
is concealed in everyday experience. The same holds for
the narrator's description of Roderick's macabre painting
of an underground tunnel, in which 'certain accessory
portions of the design served well to convey the idea that
this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface
of the earth'. 27 And finally, Poe's descriptions of music are as
impossibly vague as Lovecraft's stunted polar travel diaries.
Foremost among Roderick's improvisations on the guitar is
'a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild
air of the last waltz of von Weber'. 28 If a musicologist were
to specify the precise distortions of Roderick's melodies in
a report commissioned by psychiatrists, or if we heard a
recorded version of the music, the effect would be ruined.
The point is not to pin down his exact deviations from
mainstream musical practice, but to hint that something
is terribly amiss in the relation between the music and its
exact tones.

In Lovecraft as in Poe, the horror of things comes not
from some transcendent force lying outside the bounds of
human finitude, but in a twisting or torsion of that finitude
itself. The immediate fusion between a thing and its
tangible signals gives way to the detachment of a tortured
underlying unit from its outward qualities. In similar
fashion, cubist painting renders its figures paradoxically

26. Ibid., 327.

27. Ibid, 325.

28. Ibid, 324.

360

Harman - Horror of Phenomenology / Tilford - Agitations

distinct from the amassing of planes and angles through
which they are presented. It is no accident that only certain
paintings by Georges Braque seem to approach a notion
of what Lovecraftian architecture might look like, 29 and
surely no accident that Ortega y Gasset links Husserl with
Picasso. 30 That said, we should turn briefly from Lovecraft
and Poe to the Husserlian version of cubism.

29. Among other instances, see Braque's 1908 canvas 'House at l'Estaque' best
viewed in conjunction with Lovecraft's description of the Antarctic city.

30. Jose Ortega y Gasset, 'On Point of View in the Arts', trans. P. Snodgress and
J. Frank. In T'Jie Dehumanization of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968),

129-130.

361

COLLAPSE IV

What is most disturbing about intentional objects is that
they are both always and never present. Husserl established
that the field of perception is made up of objects, not sense
data. Yet hotels, museums, and trees require the most
laborious work of eidetic variation to free them of all noise,
and even this method never succeeds. The hotel is present
from the start, yet we never reach a truly exemplary vision
of it, free of environmental accident. Nor are these accidents
ever directly present. As soon as we shift our focus from the
hotel as a whole to the peripheral dance of light along its
facade, we have turned sunbeams or moon-rays into our
new intentional object, and the eidetic reduction will now
be blocked by further shimmering variations that do not
affect the beams or rays as a whole. Intentional objects are
everywhere and nowhere; they 'bubble and blaspheme
mindlessly' at every point in the cosmos. Although vividly
present as soon as we acknowledge them, intentional objects
express their reality only by drawing neighboring objects
into their orbit, and these things in turn are only present by
enslaving still others. As Merleau-Ponty first observed, the
structure of perception is not obvious in the least. There is no
such thing as a directly given experience. Even less directly
given would be the real objects lying outside all intentional
experience, bracketed by Husserl and hence not considered
in this article. Just as Lovecraft's horror has nothing to
do with transcendent things themselves, the horror of
phenomenology arises even though all transcendent reality
is suspended. Lovecraft's heroes cannot maintain their faith
in the familiar contract between things and their properties,
since the creatures they encounter are never quite captured
by any list of tentacles or strange vocal timbres. A weird

362

Harman - Horror of Phenomenology / Tilford - Agitations

reading of phenomenology (the only possible reading) loses
faith not just in the given sense data of empiricists, but even
in the clean separation between objects and qualities. What
is present is never objects or qualities, but only a fission
between one object and the satellite objects bent by its
gravitational field, even if everyday perception deadens us
to this fact.

Without having even considered the status of real
objects, we find that intentional objects already have a
weirdness that eludes definition. It is often falsely held
that phenomena have definite qualitative features, which
is the position of empiricism, not of Husserl. It is held
even more widely, and just as falsely, that real objects must
have definite material features and exact positions in space-
time. These views form the apparent motive for recent
philosophies of 'the virtual.' If real and intentional objects
are both somehow actual, both fully enshrined in the world
in a manner that could in principle be described, then
both seem fully inscribed in a context or web of mutual
interrelations. And since true realism requires that things
be considered apart from all relations, the only solution
would be to shift the scene of realism away from concrete
objects and phenomena towards disembodied attractors,
topological invariants, or other virtual entities, all of them
outstripping any possible embodiment in specific entities. 31

What this step misses is the already abominable
weirdness of concrete objects, whether real or phenomenal.
But Lovecraft and Husserl do not miss this point. Though
the materialism of Lovecraft and the idealism of Husserl

31. See especially Manuel DeLanda's wonderful Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy.
(London: Continuum, 2002).

363

COLLAPSE IV

might seem to divide them, these doctrines go hand in hand.
For we are never really sure just what an object is. Whether
we define it as nothing more than electrons, or as just a shape
present in consciousness, we replace the fathomless reality
of things with an intellectual model of what their underlying
reality ought to be. In this sense, realism tends to oppose
the outlooks of Lovecraft and Husserl. Yet in a different
sense, they save the weirdness of objects from its neglect by
philosophies of the virtual. While such philosophies may
deserve admiration for insisting on realism against any
idealism or narrowly physical materialism, they are wrong
to hold that objects are always utterly specific. Lovecraft
(surprisingly) and Husserl (unsurprisingly) remain fixed on
a material/phenomenal plane that prevents them from being
full-blown metaphysical realists. But at least they grasp the
weird tension in the phenomena themselves, always in tense
dissolution from their qualities. It is a one-legged realism
that misses the genuine hiddenness of things, but a weird
realism nonetheless.

364

365

COLLAPSE IV

Arbor Deformia

Kristen Alvanson

Among manuscripts published and treatises written
on teratology and cryptozoology one work has been
more influential than others: Ambroise Pare's Des monstres
et des prodiges, written in the sixteenth century. Pare was a
distinguished French surgeon, the royal surgeon of Henry
II, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III. Monsters and
Prodigies was penned by Pare at the peak of the sixteenth-
century teratological frenzy inherited from the occult
and medical preoccupations of the Middle Ages. Written
toward the later stages of his professional life as a surgeon,
Monsters and Prodigies is a monstrous paean to arborescent
models of taxonomy. For Pare, as a scientist who believed
that his teratologic treatise should be incorporated with his
works on surgery and practical medicine, the problem of
taxonomy is more twisted and deformed than monsters
and deformities themselves. Problems inherited from
the Middle Ages concerning theological riddles, occult
forces and fantastic fauna cannot easily be reconciled with
Renaissance solutions. Therefore, for Pare what is deemed
as truly monstrous is taxonomy itself: How is it possible to
build a monstrous order or taxonomy to bring all fiends, rogue beings,
demonic deformities and divine marvels back into thefoldl

367

ARBOR DEFORMIA

Biological force
(interspecies)

T

Biological force
(lineage)

Alvanson - Arbor Deformia

'Taxonomy as monstrous', 'hierarchy as deformity',
'category as schizophrenic order' and 'tree as lusus natural
could all stand as partial characterisations of Pare's
teratological system. In order to tackle the enigma of
deformities, monsters and prodigies once and for all, Pare
creates a paraphysical model in which (I) Singularity, (II)
planes and (III) forces are the main components from
which to concoct a taxonomic system. Forces derive from
different fields or spheres and vary from occult-paranormal
to mechanical-physical forces; in Pare's system, most of
the taxonomies evolve out of interactions between these
elements. These interactions include the application of
forces to planes, the fusion of forces with each other or
the conflict of certain forces with singularity. However, the
force of Godhead or singularity is capable of developing
taxonomies on its own. These elements can produce thirteen
causes which incite abnormalities. Further classifying, Pare
divides these causes into another four groups based on
which deformities are identified: (i) marvellous causes, (ii)
monstrous causes, (iii) mutilating causes and finally (iv)
fraudulent causes. Marvelous causes are those which belong
to the direct intervention of God and are divided into (1)
wrath and (2) glory of God. Monstrous causes originate
from the fusion of different forces or the application of
different forces to certain planes; they are (3) too many
seeds, (4) too little seed and (5) maternal imagination
during pregnancy. Mutilations are mostly brought forth
by the application of mechanical forces either directly to
the embryo or through the womb; the rest originate from
biological forces which themselves are divided into two
sources, interspecies and hereditary. Mutilations include
(6) deformity or smallness of the womb, (7) bodily postures
of the mother during pregnancy, (8) unnatural pressure,

369

Alvanson - Arbor Deformia

blows or even a blast of air to the womb, (9) hereditary
or accidental illnesses, (10) rotten seed, (11) mingling of
seeds belonging to different species. The fourth category of
causes, fraudulent causes, are strictly related to occult forces:
(12) through the artifice of wicked beggars, (13) demons
and the Devil himself. Among these thirteen causes, 1 1 and
13 can form a categorical alliance - causes by unnatural
conceptions (13a). The causes involving seeds (3, 4, 10, 11)
can merge together to compose yet another offshoot, causes
by unnatural seeds (13b). In this manner, Pare continues to
add more branches, stems, branchlets, twigs and unnatural
fruits to his taxonomy. Although Pare briefly touches on
African and oceanic monsters, he emphasizes that the
origin of monsters should be left hidden, referring to the
cryptogenic essence of the monstrous.

The Arbor Deformia (see p.368) is a schematic designed
after the Parean system of teratological taxonomy. Taking
taxonomy as the monstrous idea inclusive of all monsters
and deformities, the Arbor Deformia is an arborescent model
in the tradition of the early trees of knowledge, elements,
demons and celestial bodies. The Arbor Deformia follows the
tradition of arborescent distributions where the idea of the
tree is the ratio of two operations, contraction and expansion,
represented by two folds, roots and branches. In early
arborescent models the tree is not a dichotomous totality
but a proportional relation between the underground and
elevated activities; it is also the perpetuation of asymmetries
or deformities in symmetry or form. The non-dichotomous
relation between the root and the branch is typified by
the trunk as the middle-ground part of the model. Given
that the tree is a ratio between underground and elevated
activities, it can be infinitely deformed without losing its

371

COLLAPSE IV

defining outlines. As a part of the ratio between roots and
branches, new changes can be made within the existing
range which is marked by the two poles, roots and branches.
This enormous capacity for deformation is exemplified in
the image of hollow trees. Hollow trees frequently appear in
illustrations and paintings of the Grotteschi style, Arabesque-
inspired ornamental engravings of the sixteenth century,
not to mention the dead elm trees that feature in Italian
Renaissance paintings. A thirteenth-century engraving from
the Ornamentale Vorlage-Bldtter made by the Flemish sculptor
and draughtsman Cornelis Floris II depicts a tree which is
not a tree, but a sport of nature. Alluding to the forbidden
fruit of the Garden of Eden, Floris' tree is in the shape of a
fruit bursting open with demons, monsters and serpents. It
is a hollowness which only in appearance bears the burden
of its tree-ness.

New forces and planes have been added to Arbor
Deformia to include those causes of deformities which are
absent in Pare's taxonomy. Arbor Deformia is comprised of
five forces and two planes. Forces include (1) hereditary
biological forces, (2) inter-specific biological forces, (3)
mechanical forces, (4) occult forces, and (5) geopathic
forces. The plane of the differential and the plane of geo-
mechanics are the receptive planes for forces. The plane
of geo-mechanics is not directly involved in producing
deformities and monsters, but connects two different forces
which can cause abnormalities: The plane of the differential
expresses the embryonic stage of cell differentiation. A
blow is a mechanical force; when it is applied to the womb
during the embryonic differentiation of cells it can cause a
deformity in the fetus and consequently, the newborn. For
example, a mechanical shock transmitted to the limb buds

372

Alvanson - Arbor Deformia

can later cause the baby to have seven toes on each foot and
no elbows, because the limb buds contain in themselves the
ideas of toes and elbows which will later differentiate into the
actual toes and elbows. Excessive or unwanted application
of mechanical forces to the embryo may cause a group of
deformities called mutilations. In Arbor Deformia, marvels
are created by singularities such as the direct intervention
of God. The cases of deformities or inversion of internal
organs which are not lethal are usually associated with the
direct intervention of God and considered marvels. Jean
Mace, a seventy-two-year-old soldier, was dissected after
his death and found to be a perfect epitome of situs inversus,
with his heart and spleen being on the right, the liver on
the left. Joseph- Guichard Duverney the French anatomist,
declared the case a marvel because the original internal
deformity was originally situated in the performed germ in
such a way as not to cause death or mutilation.

Occult forces include a wide range of influences and
emanations including imagination, electricity, odic and
magnetic force, demonic influences, etc. The womb,
according to Renaissance teratological models, is the
organ which hungers for external forces. 1 Any ambiguous
emotion or obscure force directed toward a woman will be
absorbed and picked up by the womb. The classic medieval
example of the occult influence of imagination upon the
embryo is 'a woman looking upon an ape too attentively
during her pregnancy and as a result giving birth to a baby
with thick black hair covering the entire body and even
inside the mouth'. Occult forces can conflict or join with
other forces to cause deformities. For this reason, occult

1 . According to Renaissance texts, if the female seed does not fruit, it will ferment by
its own hunger, rot and turn into vermin which will devour or disfigure the womb
(cf. Isabella de Moerloose's account in her autobiography, 1695).

375

COLLAPSE IV

forces are mostly involved with fraudulent deformities. For
example, electricity as an occult force can combine with
a mechanical force and give rise to a fraud. A mother bat
warmly breastfeeding its baby on an electricity wire has
been electrocuted. The mechanical haptic bond between
the mother and the baby has been captured by electricity;
and hence, a motherly contact has been deformed to a
monstrous fraud (see facing page) . Occult forces can also
work upon themselves to produce further frauds. A person
who has spent a long time in absolute darkness can permeate
a spectral image joined to his torso or the back of his head.
Such spectral frauds might be in the form of a second head,
a shape-shifting and conjoined twin, etc. Such auric or
proto-ectoplasmic frauds are usually associated with odic, 2
magnetic or other occult emanations. Occult forces are able
to conflict with singularity or alter the will of God into a
fraud. A succubus can have sex with a man as he sleeps,
turning his dream of being a man to the awakening of a
water beetle.

In Far Eastern, especially Chinese, teratology, monsters
can come to life through the combination of earthly
forces and occult influences. A geopathic force or stress is
usually defined in terms of harmful earth rays connected

2. Odic force is a name given in the nineteenth century by Carl von Reichenbach
to a hypothetical vital force, a life flux which emanates from vital substances and is
similar to electricity and magnetism. Odic force manifests itself most often in the
mouth, the hands, the forehead and the occiput and has different laws of distribution
than those of electricity: 'Odylo-luminous phenomena of great extent appearing over
metal plates (electrified or unisolated) do not adhere to the metallic surface, as the
electrical currents do, but flow over it as the aurora borealis does over the earth.
Odylic currents do not flow merely from the points but also from the sides of bodies,
even of jagged bodies, e.g. large crystals: electricity prefers a point for exit.' (Carl
von Reichenbach)

376

V

1 ■

Jfy

€

Alvanson - Arbor Deformia

to the earth's electromagnetic fields, fault lines, minerals,
underground caves, etc. These forces can combine with
occult forces which influence the plane of geo-mechanics and
cause particular deformities. A boy at the onset of puberty
who walks along and over leylines or other energy lines can
be influenced by earthly-occult radiations which might drive
the boy mad or increase the rate of bone growth, enlarging
the head or putting an end to his overall growth. In Chinese
teratology, there have been cases of pregnant women who,
after being exposed to a particular location such as a former
altar for sacrificing humans or a house with a dark history,
have given birth to extremely deformed babies. Since these
deformities are caused by more than one obscure force they
are categorized as the group of multiple frauds. The last two
forces, the hereditary and inter-specific biological forces,
make the organic fold of the tree over which non-organic
forces grow and blossom. Unnatural conceptions between
pigs and men or ants and lions are among inter-specific
biological deformities. While deformation by a corrupt
seed belongs to the hereditary forces or forces associated
with the lineage. Arbor Deformia shows the proportion of its
branches to its roots, of the inorganic arms to the organic
appendages. Monsters, frauds, marvels, mutilations and
multiple frauds are the fruits of this proportional relation.

379

COLLAPSE IV

Notes on Contributors
and Acknowledgements

Kristen Alvanson

An American artist living and working in the Middle East,
Alvanson has been published in John Russell's anthology Frozen
liars 3 and has previously contributed to Collapse. She is
currently exploring the threefold of Middle East, Women and
Fabric in a project entitled Cosmic Drapery and working on a book
entitled Lessons in Schizophrenia.

Jake and Dinos Chapman

The collaborative works of brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman
remain among the most consistently radical and invigorating
forces in contemporary art. They have exhibited internationally
and were recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate
Liverpool in 2006-7 (See Bad Art for Bad People, ed. C. Grunenberg
and T Barson, London: Tate Publishing, 2006).

Iain Hamilton Grant

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West
of England. He has written widely on post-Kantian European
philosophy and is translator of Lyotard's Libidinal Economy and
Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death and author of Philosophies
of Nature After Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006).

Graham Harman

Professor of philosophy at the American University in Cairo,
Egypt, and currently Visiting Associate Professor at the University
of Amsterdam. Author of Tool-Being (Chicago: Open Court, 2002),
Guerrilla Metaphysics (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), Heidegger
Explained (Chicago: Open Court, 2007), and Prince of Networks:
Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (forthcoming) .

391

COLLAPSE IV

Michel Houellebecq,

As well as being the author of several bestselling novels, including
Atomised (trans. F. Wynne, London: Heinemann, 2000) - filmed by
Oscar Roehler in 2006 - and Platform (trans. F. Wynne, London:
Heinemann, 2002), Michel Houellebecq has published several
books of poetry (collected in Poesies, Paris: J'ai Lu, 2000) and
various essays - notably his 1991 book on H. P. Lovecraft Against
the World, Agaiiist Life (trans. D. Khazeni, San Francisco, CA:
Believer Books, 2005). Houellebecq's most recent novel was The
Possibility of an Island (2005, trans. G. Bowd, London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 2007). He now lives and works in Ireland.

Oleg Kulik

The practice of Oleg Kulik, who has been internationally acclaimed
as one of the most radical artists working today, encompasses
extraordinary live actions, manipulated photography and other
media. Much of his past work has been concerned with exploring
the subject of animal as human being or animal as a non-anthro-
pomorphous Other. A book documenting Kulik's work since
1993 accompanied his 2001 performance in the UK {Oleg Kulik:
Art Animal, Birmingham: Ikon Gallery 2001). He is represented by
XL Gallery, Moscow (xlgallery@gmail.com).

Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti has gathered a dedicated cult following and
garnered critical acclaim and awards for his fiction, which includes
the collections Teatro Grotesco (London: Random House, 2008),
Noctuary (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1994) and Songs of a Dead
Dreamer (London: Robinson Publishing, 1989). He is currently
working on a volume of theoretical writings entitled 'The Conspiracy
Against the Human Race.

392

Notes on Contributors

QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX

A graduate in philosophy from the Ecole Normale Superieur,
Quentin Meillassoux wrote his doctoral thesis on The Divine
Inexistence: An Essay on the Virtual God, and has been teaching
philosophy at the ENS since 1997. He is author of Apres lafinitude:
Essai sur la necessite de la contingence (Paris: Seuil 2006; English
translation After Finitude, trans. R. Brassier, London: Continuum,
2008).

China Mieville

China Mieville is an author of weird fiction. He has won the
Arthur C Clarke Award twice, for his novels Perdido Street Station
(London: Macmillan, 2000) and Iron Council (London: Macmillan,
2 004) . His other books include a collection of short fiction, Looking
for Jake (London: Macmillan, 2005), and a book for younger
readers, Un Lun Dun (London: Macmillan, 2007). His non-fiction
includes Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Tlieory of International Law
(London: Haymarket, 2005).

Reza Negarestani

Reza Negarestani is a philosopher working in Shiraz, Iran. He
is the author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials
(Melbourne: Re.Press, forthcoming 2008).

Benjamin Noys

Benjamin Noys teaches in the Department of English at the
University of Chichester. He is the author of Georges Bataille: A
Critical Introduction (London/Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000) and
The Culture of Death (Oxford/NY: Berg, 2005). Currently he is
writing a new book, The Persistence of the Negative.

393

COLLAPSE IV

Rafani

The art collective Rafani have exhibited extensively in the Czech
Republic and elsewhere since their founding in 2000 by four
students from Prague's Academy of Fine Arts. Their constitu-
tion states that they 'build on the everyday experience of wide
social strata; we analyse it and look for points that go beyond the
sphere of the mundane. With a conscious art form we attempt
to reflect their interests, dreams, fears, and ambitions. What we
express is in harmony with their ideas ; we speak the language of
bitter truth.'

Steven Shearer

Steven Shearer is an artist who lives and works in Vancouver,
Canada. Shearer exhibits internationally, with recent exhibitions
including solo presentations at the IKON Gallery, Birmingham,
The Power Plant, Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, and De
Appel, Amsterdam, most recently showing at the New Museum,
New York in a two person exhibition entitled Double Album.

George Sieg

George J. Sieg is a doctoral research student at Exeter Centre for
the Study of Esotericism, currently writing his PhD thesis on the
genesis and development of occult warfare. He is also preparing
for publication a monograph on the origins of Zoroastrian dualism
and the concept of Druj. He continues to pursue further oppor-
tunities to explore the liminal boundary between esoteric and
academic theory and praxis.

Eugene Thacker

Eugene Thacker is associate professor of new media at the
Georgia Institute of Technology. His publications include Biomedia
(Minneapolis: U. Minnesota Press, 2004) and The Global Genome:
Biotechnology, Fblitics and Cidture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).
He has recently published (with Alexander Galloway) The Exploit:
A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: U. Minnesota Press, 2008).

394

Notes on Contributors

Keith Tilford

An artist currently working in Seattle, USA, Keith Tilford's blog

can be found at http://metastableequilibrium.blogspot.com

James Trafford

James Trafford is a doctoral student at the University of East
London, nearing completion of his dissertation in post-Kantian
materialism. He is most interested in pursuing the intersection of
continental philosophy and philosophy of mind, and in particular,
the asymmetry of phenomenal experience and scientific realism.

TODOSCH

Perhaps best known for his attempt to attack the 2000 Hanover
Expo with a paramilitary convoy, artist Thorsten Schlopsnies, aka
Todosch, has also exhibited sculpture and graphic work, and has
been involved in various musical projects, as well as staging live
actions. See http://todosch.felix-werner.net/

Translation of "The Spectral Dilemma ' by Robin Mackay.
Translation of Michel Houellebecq 's work by Robin Mackay, with thanks to
Armelle Menard Seymour and Delphine Grass.

Thanks to Ivan Mecl of Divusfr his help and assistance with regard to the
work of Rafani and Todosch.

Tlianks to Serge Khripun and Elina Selina of XL Gallery^ Moscow, and
for their co-operation with regard to the work qfOlegKulih.
Tlianks to Katherine Gardner o/Tiouse of Chapman for her help with
regard to the work of Jake and Dims Chapman, and to fake and Dinosfor
their enthusiasm and co-operation.

Tlianks to Ilsa Colsell o/~Stuart Shave Modern Art for her assistance with
regard to the work of Steven Shearer, and to Steven himself for his attentive
co-operation.

Tlianks to Damian Veal for his tireless proofreading and editorial assistance.
Special tlianks to Ruth and Donald Mackay for being a potent antidote to the
horrors oflfe and editorship.

395

396

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The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou's Minimalist Metaphysics

Sam Gillespie

Gillespie tackles the issue of philosophical materialism in Deleuze and Badiou,
enquiring after the source and nature of the 'novelty' that both philosophers of
multiplicity claim to discover in the objective world. Working with the addition
of Lacan's concept of anxiety, the author illuminates the form of the relation
Badiou determines between philosophy and its conditions (art, love, science,
politics]. This leads to the polemical conclusion that, as a transformative
project Badiou's philosophy ultimately reclaims the power of the negative from
the positivity and pure productiveness of Deleuze's system, thereby freeing
thought from the limits set by experience.

The Radical Critique of Liberalism: In Memory of a Vision

Toula Nicolacopoulos

There are many books about liberalism, but no defence of radical critique that
treats liberal theory with the depth, breadth and intensity of this work.
Rigorously examining Rawls, Waldron, Larmore and Kymlicka, the book
demonstrates that an adequate appreciation of the deep structural flaws of
liberal theory presupposes the application of a critical philosophical
methodology that has the power to reveal the systemic interconnections within
and between the varieties of liberal inquiring practices.

Hegel's Jena Philosophy of Nature - 'The Organics'

G.W.F Hegel (translated by Erich D. Freiberger)

Never before translated, this part of Hegel's work represents a significant
contribution to both Hegelian scholarship and modern philosophy as a whole.
This translation consists of 'the Organics' of 1 803/4 and 1 805/6 from
Hegel's early Jena Philosophy of Nature.

Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

Reza Negarestani

The Cyclonopedia manuscript remains one of the few books to rigorously and
honestly ask what it means to open oneself to a radically non-human life — this
is a text that screams, from a living assemblage known as the Middle East, 'I
am legion.' Cyclonopedia refuses to be called either 'theory' or 'fiction'; a
heady mixture of philosophy, the occult, and the tentacular fringes of Iranian
culture— call it 'occultural studies' (Eugene Thacker, author of Biomedia and
The Global Genome).

The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critical Analysis of the
Emergence of Postmarxism

Geoff Boucher

Boucher combines close reading, careful exposition and polemical intent to
offer an immanent critique of 'postmarxian' cultural theory. Concentrating his
attention on Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Zizek, Boucher links the relativism
exemplified in contemporary theoretical trends to unresolved philosophica
problems of modernity. In conclusion, Boucher points to 'intersubjectivity' as an
exit from postmarxist theory's charmed circle of ideology.

Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity

Andrew Benjamin, Tara Forrest and Charles Rice (editors)

The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic

Alain Badiou, translated by Tzuchien Tho

Of Ideology

Alain Badiou, translated by Zachery Luke Fraser

Theory of Contradiction

Alain Badiou, translated by A.J. Bartlett & Justin Clemens

current titles

The Spirit of the Age: Hegel and the Fate of Thinking

Paul Ashton, Toula Nicolacopoulos, and George Vassilacopoulos (editors)

The Concept of Model

Alain Badiou

The Praxis of Alain Badiou

Paul Ashton, A.J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens (editors)

Fifty Poems of Attar

Attar (ed. and trans, by Ali Alizadeh and Kenneth Avery)

Black River

Justin Clemens with artwork by Helen Johnson

re.press

repress titles can be ordered through Amazon, the publisher or through good
bookstores. Contact us for further details: info@re-press.org

www.re-press.org

|§^ University of the West of England, Bristol

An opportunity to study in depth the great traditions of
Modern European philosophy, along with its most
important contemporary tendencies.

MA European Philosophy

& -v*?>

turopean Hhitosbbhy, taught by expert staff, offers a uniquely
broad post grad uat e4evel mtraduct|ori' r f»th to the great_works of
"that tradition, and the main tendencies evident in contemporary

!uraasanPhjj|og 1^^%.^%^
2008-9 modules include: ^^S^

• The Post -Kantian Tradition (Hetjel," Rchte, Smelling)

• Phenomenology <Mer)eau-Ponty)

• Contemporary French Phjj o s ophy (D eleuze, Badiou)

• Heidegger's Being and Timel.

• Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason

L.

Core 3ta

lain Hamirton Grant Havi Carol. John Sellars,

University trf the
West of England

The University oft be West of England (UWE) is a modern,,
glowing university in the thriving city of Bristol. The MA in
European Philosophy is based at UWs St Matthias Campus.

* For further information email iain.grant@tnfe.ac.uk

* For on application pack email HLSSPo9tgrafhiate@uwe.ac.uk

* Or write to: HLSS Graduate School, Conifers, Room C001,

UWE St Matthias Campus, Oldbury Court Roari\
Bristol, BS16 2JP b United Kingdom.

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The Warwick Journal of Philosophy
Volume 19 (2008)

Sense and Nonsense

AMAW&

"The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and

wrong.'

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

'In order to be able to draw a limit to thoughts we should have to find both sides of the limit
thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore
only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will
simply be nonsense. 1

L-udwtg Wittgenstein, Tractates Logico-Philosffaicus

'Philosophy must be ontology, it cannot be anything else: but there is no ontology of essence,

there is only an ontology of sense.'

Gilles Deleuze,. Review of Logic and Existence

Pli is a journal of philosophy edited and produced by members of the Graduate School of the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Pli has no specific set of philosophical concerns but previous issues
have tended to focus upon European philosophical traditions, reflecting the interests of the graduate communit> r
at Warwick. In particular, Pli has published translations of works otherwise unavailable in English by philoso-
phers including Eric. tUiez, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derriia, Michel Foucauh; Francois Laruelle. Jean-Francois
Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Volume 19 is a collection of papers deaing with the issue of sense and nonsense, in particular in relation to
notions such as scepticism, immanence, and expression in philosophy, in the work of such thinkers as Wittgen-
stein and Deleuze. It also contains various articles on or by writers such as Badiou, Lacan, and Maimon, and a
number of reviews of recent publications in continental philosophy.

http://www AvarAvick.ac.uk/jiiilosophy/pli_journal/
plijournal@googlemail.com

COLLAPSE

Journal of Philosophical Research and Development

PREVIOUS VOLUMES

COLLAPSE Volume I (Sept. 2006)
'Numerical Materialism'
286pp/ ISBN 0-9553087-04

ALAIN BADIOU

'Philosophy, Sciences, Mathemarii
GREGORY CHAITIN
'iipistcmi-'loi^y .is Information Th
REZA NEGARESTANI
'The Militarization of Peace'
MATTHEW WATKINS
'Prime Evolution (Interview]'
'INCOGNITUM'
'Introduction to ABJAD'
NICKBOSTROM
'Existential Risk (Interview)
THOMAS DUZER
'On the Mathematics of Intensity'
KEITH TILFORD

' Ciow;^'

NICK LAND
'Qabbala 101'

COLLAPSE Volume II (March 2007)
'Speculative Realism'
315pp/ISBN 0-9553087-1-2

RAY BRASSIER

The interna of Realism

QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX

Potentiality and Virtuality

ROBERTO TROTTA

Dark. Matter: Probing the Archi-Fossil (Int

GRAHAM HARMAN

On Vicarious Causation

PAUL CHURCHLAND

Demons Get Out] (Interview)

CLEMENTINE DUZER k LAURA GOZLAN

Neven beic;^ Km piie

KRISTKN ALVANSON

Klysian Space in the Middle-East

REZA NEGARESTANI

Islamic Exotencisin :

Apocalypse in the Wake of Refractory Impossibility

COLLAPSE Volume III (November 2007)
'Unknown Deleuze'

458pp /ISBN 0-9553087-2-0

THOMAS DUZER
In Memoriam: Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995
GILLES DELEUZE
Responses to a Series of Questions
ARNAUD VILLANI
'I Feel I Am A Pure Metaphysician': The
Consequences of Deleuze's Remark
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Subtraction and Contraction: Deleu
and Matter and Memory
HASWELL St HECKER
Blackest Ever Black
GILLES DELEUZE
Mathesis, Science and Philosophy
JOHNSELLARS
The Truth about Chronos and Aion
ERIC ALLIEZ & JOHN-CLAUDE BONNE

M-.iii^e-Tlii ■ii.j.'Ik .m:: die St net Oi"::e:"in^" ' -i Fauvism

MEHRDAD IRAVANIAN

Unknown Deleuze

J.-H. ROSNY THE ELDER

Another World

RAY BRASSIER, IAIN HAMILTON

GRANT, GRAHAM HARMAN, QUENTIN

MEILLASSOUX

Speculative Realism

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COLLAPSE

Philosophical Research and Development

VOLUME IV

Contributors: Kristen Alvanson, Jake and Dinos Chapman,
Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harm an, Michel Houellebecq,
Oleg Kulik, Thomas Ligotti, Quentin Meillassoux,
China Mieville, Reza Negarestani, Benjamin Noys, Rafani,
Steven Shearer, George Sieg, Eugene Thacker, Keith Tilford,
Todosch, James Trafford.

Collapse IV features a series of investigations by philosophers,
writers and artists into 'Concept Horror'. Contributors address
the existential, aesthetic, theological and political dimensions of
horror, interrogate its peculiar affinity with philosophical thought,
and uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue
rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable.

This unique volume continues Collapse's pursuit of indisciplinary
miscegenation, the wide-ranging contributions interacting to
produce common themes and suggestive connections. In the
process a rich and compelling case emerges for the intimate bond
between horror and philosophical thought.

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